reporter peter kilborn talk about professional to possibly relocate and examines the toll it takes on families. politics and prose bookstore in washington hosted this event. is just under an hour. >> i want to thank, and barbara and all the politics for having me here. and all of you for coming. i am especially grateful for the subjects in the book, nagy fischer from the boom town of flourmount, texas, and her older son, who happens to be in washington looking at colleges. put your hands up. those are real -- they look pretty much like the rest of us. matt is a husband -- at their home one evening i watched j.c. take his dinner from the refrigerator, one heaping scoop of toll house cookies dealt and a side of raw carrots. i don't have a clue as to the view of my long depiction of them in my book. they can serve as your true spot as i discussed them. i invite you to judge the book by its cover. i did not commission the art. or meet the artist. i suspect he or she began with the vision of heat seekers in town houses, all the same, and put two car garages on them and multiple cables and little feet under them. that is how i see it. i emphasize humor. the title of this book, next stop -- "next stop, reloville: life inside america's new rootless professional class," i objected to the publisher's decision to call this new. i it goes back to the origins of world trade, as far back as the east india company and hudson bay company, nothing particularly new to being a diplomat or preacher or businessman or woman. for decades, ibm employees have said the initials stand for i have been moved. what is new? the growth of the numbers of corporate freeloaders. the breadwinners, i will start -- what is new is the growth in the numbers of corporate relos, a number i estimate to be ten million people. the breadwinners and their families and how that has grown with the growth of the american economy. american foreign trade, to cite a statistic, all the goods and services that we buy and sell abroad, from $400 billion in 1970 to over $3 trillion now. as companies, american and foreign, they need people to carry their banner and build business far from home. you have not heard the word relosville because i made it up. they are cereal long-distance movers. the word relos probably a originated among suburban real estate agents who specify in catering to them. relos tend to reduce the tween moves in relovilles, suburbs catering to them near cities where fortune 500 companies put plants and offices. right here in fairfax, va. and montgomery county, md. many are outside, outside atlanta, outside dallas, houston, denver, raleigh, charlotte, and a few midwestern cities like chicago, columbus, all i/o, minneapolis and indianapolis. fortune 500 companies in crude -- regret most of their relos from universities. maggie started in carbondale, ill. at a time with relatively low unemployment but high poverty and little opportunity for college graduates. bright and ambitious, they went to the university of illinois in urbana, and matt's accidental career as an expert in inventory management, took them to chicago, cleveland, columbus, ohio, houston, and a flower mound in michael's, a hobby came, worry is the senior director for inventory management. the fishers, like other families i introduce in the book, were chasing their own version of the american dream, like other dreamers, they wanted a home of their own, a couple of cars, college for the kids, and a vacation somewhere far. but to get there, relos have to put the american dream on wheels, they are the new mobile homes. until some, like the fishers, take a break to see their kids get into college. they don't stay in a town long enough to invest in it. fathers know their way to the international airport but not to city hall. relos exchange their roots, their sense of belonging, for a secure job and good pay and a shot in some cases at the top jobs in their companies. it is easy to rebuke them for their gilded its eli this, yet in a global economy, companies across the american economy and into beijing and singapore, many do not have much of a choice. relovilles pay a price, relos, for who no place is a real place, don't those in their town elections, they don't contribute to fund-raising drive for new museum or stadium, and why should they? they won't be around when it opens. frequent relocation can be exhilarating for relos breadwinners, most of whom are still men, the difficult for relos wives. to follow their husbands, wives abandon or postpone careers. i was impressed here relos wives speak of concern for their kids's adjustment to new schools, of rootlessness and of loneliness. i don't have a best friend, one wife said. i thought wait a minute, what do you mean? i don't have the best girlfriend. it can take years to make a best friend. i had postpartum depression with each of my children. i, as a man, have no hormonal familiarity with anything associated with postpartum depression, so i understood. [laughter] it was not an issue to raise with the neighbors, the wives would tally, or husband. for these wives it is hard enough carrying the burden of suddenly they are families, finding homes, schools, doctors and churches and arranging the home, only to have to start all over again somewhere else. recession, bad as this one is, seems not to take much of a toll on relos except for those working for crippled companies like general motors, citigroup or a ig, like home building, automobile sales, the unemployment rate, relocation roles with the economy's ups and downs, employers cut back hiring relos like other workers, and postpone promotions, requiring relos, but no help the company with hard relos run business away from home, abandoned those markets and pull back their engineers, their salespeople, financial matters, plant managers, and risk losing that business to competitors. of about 20 relos families i followed whose stories are recounted in the book, the promotions and moves of a few were stalled, and a couple dropped out. but not one has lost a job in this recession. summing up, i will cite the last paragraph. among this class of serial movers, i met people who are as clearly defined as the old oak, the old courthouse square, yet they, and in particular their children, had little notion of geographical origin, of a starting place. i think that is sad, but i can't conclude that it is bad, without room to grow in a town like stapleton, neb. these americans, the relos, become new pioneers on the global frontier. they fly where they must on the shifting winds of a breadwinner's job through booms and busts, the hardiest find a proxy for a place, close ties to their immediate family, with the help of the digital links of a boundaryless age. [applause] >> are there questions? bill? >> first, i want to congratulate you on the impressive reporting you did on putting this book together. but i am curious, as someone who already had plenty of experience with relocation in your own career, what two or three real surprises did you gain in this reporting that shaped this book? >> the biggest surprise was not the effect on children, but the effects on wives. it was a surprise, in part, because my wife, who is here, didn't bring these issues up with me much. she came along. and it was probably fruitless for her to have complained. but that was a very important thing. i was also struck by the serial relocation. a lot of people had moved to other places, but i wasn't aware of multiple moving, of people i met in paris or london or other places. i knew being from one place, i didn't know this kind of activity was a central part of their lives and we didn't really identify with any place. that was a surprise. it was a surprise too to see the communities where these people lived. everybody has seen these upscale suburbs with, for lack of a more original term, cookie cutter houses. but i was just astonished by how similar they all were. from their groundskeeping to their football rooms, there are houses with a men's room. all of these houses have similar features. i thought wait a minute, these people can't be all like that. turns out they didn't live in those houses in a predictable way. houses needed those features to sell them to another relos. they didn't want to take risks, they know they're going to have to sell it. everybody wants essentially to say house. >> i am from one of the three tells you feature in the book and you haven't said much about how you characterize the town themselves but i gathered from what you told me earlier is that you haven't been given the key to the cities in those places. i wonder if you could say something about the reaction you have heard so far? >> i had better not name names but there is one prominent figure, some newspaper report was writing an article about the book. i have them all on tape and everything is accurately recorded. all of these people say it doesn't say anything about our quality of life. wait a minute, what is quality of life? if you call the mayor of savannah or charleston or boston or san francisco, how would you compare your quality of life, what would they think, is very flat town, not anything that i could identify. i have run into these kind of chamber of commerce points of view, but nobody has suggested that i misrepresented them. >> what do you know about the relation? >> you have to go to a microphone. go up there and -- >> what did you learn about the adult's relationships with their parents? did the parents stay where they were or move with them or lament? >> that is the most fun question. i just can't cover everything. there is a stunning phenomenon that may be all of you know is out there. but i have not articulated it. you have children, they go to college, they get a job, they leave town, they are nowhere in new york where you live, and they get moving again and you are back home in bismarck, and the children love to be with you and what not, but they are in phoenix or some other place and they can't come to see you, and you as parents, is a huge effort to see them. the interaction, the decline is rapid in these families. so what ensues is what i call families of collateral relos. these are parents who follow their kids, and they go, for example, outside atlanta, a place called the season's. in this particular community it might be called the winter. but they follow their kids to what are called active adult communities. they are all back together. then the kids get moved again. and the parents get older and they are now living in a place they know nothing about, where they note nobody and they cankn get back to bismarck. it was a striking phenomenon to me. >> your book talks about the end of the relos era. i wanted to know if you -- is there an end to the relos era and what will take place and what will you name it? >> what? >> what will you name it. >> that takes a little work. since i can't define it yet. there is a predisposition among people who read the book, with hamas talk, assume digital technology, teleconferencing, twitter, facebook, are going to displace the need to moved to do business, and that is not true. it could probably enhance it. in other words, you are able to communicate more and more with your customers and employees in beijing, which can stimulate your desire to cultivate new markets. it is hard to predict how digital technology will influence this activity. bet anyone who has ever done what for them is a big transaction, buying a house, you don't do that on twitter, you don't do that on your blackberry, you sit at a desk and talk to somebody and exchange checks, that is true of all business. i can't tell where it is headed. i don't think it will get hugely bigger but it is a fact of life in the workforce and the economy. yes? >> i have experienced the phenomenon you are describing vicariously through my son, who works for a large oil company, multinational, has lived in houston, london, moscow. i have two questions. one is, are there differences between relos in foreign countries and in the united states? that is the first question. the second question is, in one of the locations, my son in london lived in the community rather than in reloville. the second question is do you see differences between the results of families that live in neighborhoods of their choosing verses those who lived in the gated communities, everyone is 8 multinational employee? >> in the first place, let's talk about america relos because i don't think you were talking about foreigners, is there a difference for the relos living in this country verses those going abroad. is that correct? those going abroad get more perks, because companies are taking greater risk, it costs a lot. it is typical unless you are a senior person going into six figures, well into six figures. they get more perks, private school tuitions, a driver in many places. i am thinking of one in particular sent to geneva and handed a form describing what he is allowed to have. and they said with respect to the car, you can have a mercedes or a bmw or a volvo and we will cover up $58,000. that doesn't happen if you are sent from phoenix to las vegas. and then you have people going to less-developed countries. is not fair to call in the a lesser developed. you really travel first-class, that is one distinction i would make. your son, you didn't mention. some of the places those guys got sent, it is the worst to me. you got put into the desert of saudi arabia for this and, there are a few houses around for the exxon mobil and chevron, you bring your whole family to those places and you get a life. this is also an islamic country, you live in a little ghetto of westerners. if your wife wants to drive into town, she can't drive, she has to be in the back seat unless -- your wife beside you in the car. these are terrible constraints for relos living in those countries. there are families who when they are transferred to a place make an extra effort to find something more akin to what they really like rather than what move fast rather than a house in these suburbs. one family, an american family, they made a point in the thick of beijing, chinese housing among chinese people and they end of enriched greatly by that. the family has a daughter who is now 19, speaks five languages, japanese-american, her mother is german, and next language was french, they get sent to beijing and in a few months she goes to japan to learn her mother's language, comes back to learn chinese. this is a kid who really got into the thick of society but there are a lot of other kids who aren't so resilience. there are people who make that effort. >> congratulations, a beautiful job of writing and reporting. i have a question. bill clinton said in one of his town hall meetings in the 90s, the average worker changes jobs eight times in a career. i would like to know, that would include the relos. i would like to know what you think of the implications, that instability. >> i'd go about the implications for the macroeconomy. there are interesting implications for the nature of the work force. half a century ago, william white road the organization matt. these were workers who went to toil for major companies. they exchange their toil for health benefits for life. that has stopped. as it has stopped, so has loyalty. if you are not going to give the benefits i will not hang around here if i don't see something better. that is a major change occurring within the work force. it is more emphatic. the most skilled relos, engineers in china, the moment they see an opportunity to grab something better they grabbed it. if the company is not delivering that in a satisfactory way. one problem they run into is having them in singapore, they don't give much thought to what to do with them when they come back. these guys know that. they look around, there is a chapter in the book of the boundaryless career. these are people who have no attachment to any particular institution. their attachment is to their skill. that and their attachment to their occupational group, all the engineers around the world, they are all members of associations, they are all helping each other out, whether they are companies or not. >> the efficiency of the corporate sector, people do not have any kind of loyalty to their companies, they are ready to jump ship at any time. >> you need an industrial psychologist to confirm that. a person in a new job, to do that job well and enhance his career and reputation, might well work harder and better and more efficiently than a guy who has been there for 25 years. >> thank you. >> two quick questions. does this address blacks at all? afro-american mobility in corporate america? i haven't read this at all. secondly, how did you choose these relos bills? >> those are two good questions. maybe i should tell you how i chose them first because it helps me answer the other one. i had been assigned by the new york times some time ago to look at the issue of class in america. that is back in the days of newspapers, they didn't worry about you spending time looking at something. it was my assignment to look at what was the upper-middle-class, we didn't know what that was. i look at some census data, we looked at suburbs north of georgia, north of have and have. i hit upon one -- i liked the name. i had to figure out what is this place, who are the people here? the best way to do it in the secluded, often negated subdivisions, was to go to the raja sales. is hard to meet people any other way. there they are in their garage and there is nobody coming by, here comes this reporter up the driveway who is there under false pretenses but do they mind talking? everybody loves to talk. that was the process of random selection. there were lots of other ways. i met maggie, it is funny, you have a cousin in minneapolis, sister-in-law. the sister-in-law was developing some kind of group on the net for people, newcomers to town. i think it was a dating service. [laughter] to me, i thought they were in the -- relos. this person couldn't help me out, i know someone just like that. i mentioned the fishers. that is one way to find other people. at soccer games and baseball games, i would sit in the stands and shoulder up to somebody and say where are you from? most people like to talk. that is how i came across people and there were probably 100, i started taking notes and had to refine and refine, brought it down to where there was still too many. the other question, blacks, it was interesting as i look at data for all these places, i looked at demographic breakdowns by race, by family income, origins, birthplace and so on. blacks were still in the minority in most of these places. where i met them, there was no difference. they were regular people. there was no distinction that i could see. they had all the same values and accent's and everything else as everybody. what was striking was in all these places, nearly all these places, the population of asians was twice the national average. so you look at these towns and you see asians, -- 5%, 10% in some of these communities. the one thing i did observe is often asians, i don't like to stereotypes, this is just a fact, might have been asians from just one country, they would parcel out time for the use of the community pool. so the anglos would use the subdivision pull during prime hours, 10:00 to 3:00, than the asians come out. maybe they were just smart about the sun. i don't know what was going on. there was an interesting cultural difference. >> congratulations, peter. my question, maybe too abstract, we talk about a sense of place as being the defining human characteristic. if you had to distill it down, how does the absence of a sense of place manifest itself among these people? >> i could almost ask j.c. that makes it hard to define yourself. as i approached many people, just to get a discussion going, i would say who are you? i say well, i am from cicero, ill.. echo they start to find out. .. >> it's a hard thing to deal with. but most of us belong somewhere. >> good job, peter. i was struck by the parallels that many of us are here from the foreign service. that's a little bit different from being in different countries, but some of us don't have a real basis back in the states. you had problems with our parents and all that. how do you characterize parallel with the foreign service and your relo friends? >> one question that comes up is why didn't you do military and foreign service and those populations. i figure they are a very different story. they go through all the anxieties of people moving, but they tend to move within the government could tune. the military more so with the state department. but in the military everywhere you go there is the px. wherever the hamburger is there to have a school system that is overseen by the pentagon. might be owned by the pentagon. the transportation service is always the same. the health benefits are always the same. and further, while there are an awful lot of military bases, there comes a time when you are seeing people that you have seen at other ones and you maintain friendships and relationships. now, in the state department that's a little esoteric you would be in the pit of her one somewhere and they would be no other state department around and you are dealing with just with someone who said in the field of saudi arabia. and also, state department people tend to come back between assignments. so they always come home and touch base and then they go off again. that doesn't happen to these people. so is that -- >> thank you. >> high, peter. i was wondering if amongst all of these people you found any who rejoice who loved it just for its own sake. >> yes. there is one couple in the book, and i love talking about them because they were such a surprise. in littleton colorado, and he was 72 and she is 70. their name is selby when you come across them. and i went to see them. i knew nothing about them. she was involved in called a newcomer screw. there are newcomers groups all over this country. but for often they are for newcomers who are there to stay. but that's how i came across them. they are living in a large, well kept but unpretentious ranch house in the middle income subdivision of littleton. as i went in, there was not much furniture around. i mean, these are old people. they're supposed to be a lot of artifacts around. stuff on the shelves, pictures of all the grandkids, all the stuff that you have by the time you are 70. hardly anything. and they had a large oak coffee table, roughly the size of this square, maybe 10 books on it and i said tell me about the books. and she said well, they're not ours, we got them from the library. we don't buy books. and then he said yeah, books weigh a lot. do you ever try to move with a lot of books? so they don't own any books. they had moved to 26 times before landing in littleton. and over the last couple of moves, they got rid of all their silver except the tableware, except the utensils. they just keep dumping stuff. and they are very happy with themselves. they thought of think and operate, synchrony, i don't see in my house. [laughter] >> there was just a rhythm to them. one other aspect about them. they had two sons. i am going on too long i think about these people, but they impressed me so much. they had two sons, and the sons were born in billings montana when there parents went for five or six years. one son these days, came back to billings, married a girl who was part of a large family. now he is part of that large family and he is building a large family. and he will not budge. he is just totally attached. the other one, and his story is just fascinating, is in montana. and this is not a rich family, but there is some rich man in montana who pays for one kid a year -- well, for the four-year duration of school to go to saint paul school and new hampshire. you just paste the whole thing. he goes and finds some super bright kid or so this boy couldn't study languages in billings. and so he signed up and he was accepted. and then he got cold feet and turned him down. then he reconsider. is terratec never even been to see the place. they didn't know what he was up to. and so he reconsider and called him up and said no, i think i do want to do that. it's too late, but let's see what we can do for him. so he gets into hotchkiss, and the rich man puts them in hotchkiss. in one year he is boy of the year at hotchkiss. is broad gauged athletic, a great student and everything else. the next thing he is sent to france for a few months. and as his mother told me, he backed away and said wait a minute, what's this about being first in everything? i don't want to be first in everything. look at this life in france. lookup people live. account they enjoy life. so he came back and finished hotchkiss, and still was doing well enough to get into yale. at hotchkiss trades on the number of people they are eight ball to get into jail. he didn't want anything of that. he went to the university of the pacific in stockton, california. the next year went to japan. he graduates and he joins a backpacking company. and he leads people on bicycles all around the country, and for a long time lived nowhere and owned nothing but what he could fit in his volkswagen bug. he married. he settled down and colorado springs, but he and his wife don't want to have children. and they live in a very small house and they are very happy. that it's a wholly different outcome. and i think both of those outcomes are consequences of the kind of upbringing they had. does that answer anything? [laughter] >> it resonates for me. my parents had 26 moves in 55 years of marriage. i know what you're talking about. [laughter] >> how are you? let me ask you if you saw anything about the companies that employ the people, how many of them recognized as an early attempt to provide more stability for the employees, realizing that they do they would probably be more. things like if you are with an oil company in houston and you worked there for a couple of years and maybe send you to africa for three years, but guaranteed to bring you back to houston for a few more years. and then maybe to alaska for a few years, but they will bring you back to houston. so you kind of have a permanent place in a way. you are with microsoft in seattle. the city to new england, but you come back. you are rotated back to a central, kind of central place. and maybe they help you, the kind of companies that belong to the relocation council of america, you know, that help companies with a spousal job counseling and all those kinds of things. do you see some of these companies providing that, looking into that sort of things? and in helping their employees? is there any trend one way or another on that first. >> companies have all become very sophisticated in dealing with the score of the relos. i mean, it's a sizable population out and they construct good human resources policies to accommodate them. some have more heart than others. and those companies who are looking at these people in terms of the chain of command with the company saying this guy, jim, who is a young, you know, brand manager at png, i think we'll put him in charge of a couple of years and didn't want to give him the whole pampers operations. so they are looking at you and they are moving along and they're going to do everything to keep you happy and healthy. but there are many, many others who have significant skills. not brand manager. they are software engineers. they really know something. that they can transfer anywhere, and as i've said before, companies might accommodate them but they are not interested in becoming senior vice president for software engineering or something. they are interested in -- i don't know, whatever the new challenges. but i don't know all of the answers. i spent a lot of time with ups, and with their human resources department and with ups employees. ups moves 1200 people a year. it tries to do the right thing, and it recognized some years ago that, hey, we got to be a little bit less brutal here. they used to have -- they just said go. now they ask about your family. they try to do things to accommodate you, if you don't get demoted if you refuse a move. very often, people there, ups will take him you fell right off the chain of a corporate advancement if you refused to move. ups as they don't do that anymore, and i think that's true. >> thank you. >> yes, sir. hi. >> high, peter. and my congratulations to all the rest. i wonder what happens to these people, perhaps in the statistics since after they're done with their moving around, had to develop habits that don't allow them to settle down, what do they do with their lives and where do they end up? >> no, i told you about the celebes, and they say this is our last home until the home. i guess -- where did he end up is, they will find a place to end up, and it is very often and do their kids if it doesn't mean being collateral relos what they have moved just to be near their kids. many other kids have gone to settle down somewhere, and they tried to be -- tried to move someplace within a half-hour of where their kids are, but not 10 minutes away because they don't want that daily interaction of being asked to babysit and everything. so those were -- loads of them told me that. and then carry on with their own lives. >> i was wondering, these people move often. they buy houses, they sell houses. they don't build up in equity. they don't have mortgages that when it comes to the end and they have to settle, don't have something of a problem? >> no, it soon be having a problem, but over -- since the mid '90s, they have become rich. they buy a house for $100,000 in dollars and then a year it's up to $200,000. they take that new paper equity out of the house and buy a new house for $400,000. they are building up their own 401(k)s. they are building up their retirement funds with the houses. and some of these towns it's astonishing how much will these people accumulated with their housing. ups employees in particular moving from greenwich connecticut in the early '90s in atlanta, where houses were dirt cheap and they bought the spouses. and they still realize significant gains, those who moved first. so unlike your suspicion, these people tend to do very well because of their houses. now we don't know what's going to happen. that happens in the reloville by and large, the cities outside dallas, denver, atlanta and whatnot, price depreciation has been much less acute than in places where there are few relos, but a lot of houses, north las vegas is one stunning place. phoenix is another. there just aren't many relos in those places. people move to those places to stay but the builders stay ahead of them building too many houses so they depreciate. in these places where they are moving through, there's another below coming along to buy the house and the companies helping them. so that helps offset the impact of what we are saying on housing prices elsewhere. >> i have a follow-up question about companies. i worked for a major oil company and moved three times with them, but that was after having on my own and moving around the country for different, you know, just looking for adventure. when i got to the big multinational, what i saw was they would move you, but they would kind of steer you. so they would steer you to specific, which you are calling reloville, but it is i want to live in a city, i want to live in manhattan. i want to live, you know, only in that kind of funky little redevelopment, they say no, that's outside the cookie-cutter. they don't even have the people there. so i am wondering just going back as a sociologist, which is where i started out, is that they have taken what used to be the greenwich village -- greenwich, connecticut, to new york phenomenon and done in these reloville's where they are still packaging people to kind of control the culture and kind of guidance of their part of the corporation or the still organization being there. >> does a brilliant observation that you are totally right. and there are some companies that are loose enough to let you go live in greenwich village or any equivalent or something. but companies know they're going to have to buy your house if you have trouble selling it because they want you to hit the ground running in the next place. they don't want a pig in a poke. in houston, there is a house with crushed tin cans, soda cans, on its exterior walls. it claims in the wind. that god might love that house. but his employer is never going to sell it. so they need houses that the companies know will sell. they also urged you when you move to, let's say, atlanta tried to see if you can get a house that is less than 15 years all. and don't buy any house with artificial stucco outside in. because stucco siding is susceptible to water damage and it depresses the value. they give your kind of guidance to kind of steer you into these places. one consequence around operetta. alpharetta was built in the '70s. it's gone to seed. it's quite nice ranch houses and whatnot, but no companies will support the worker going to live in 40 year old houses. so now it's moved from home ownership to rental, and it is in decline. so yes, you are right. companies do sort of dictate to some extent where you're going to live. >> i'm sorry. >> we will make this the last one. >> peter, if you look at the table of contents in your book, there's a geographic line from texas and colorado, and everything on the west coast is not included for some reason. and i think that there is a reason for that, and i would like very much for you to discuss what's going on, suddenly colorado to texas is in that everything is going to the east and nothing to the west. >> the populous areas of the west coast where companies would have significant facilities are expensive. california land prices, particularly around l.a. and san francisco and the other attractive locations, the price is four, five, six times what they are outside atlanta or dallas. that discourages companies from expanding to those places so they might put a facility there, but their future facilities as they put someplace else. they also know that even if they put a facility in marion county, their employees won't be able to buy a house there. so they don't do it. and that's true also of seattle, there are a couple of towns around seattle. >> but the other issue is that you raise before what's happening in the heartland of the united states. >> i think that's a different book. [laughter] >> oklahoma are the places where they come from. >> what's happening to those places? all these people come from those places, they end up at the other places. you know, the anti-oklahoma, the best and the brightest leave those states. because of the corporate recruiters grab them. that in your hometown is not going to come to lincoln, nebraska, to grab you from the university of nebraska. major companies are, and that's where they end up. i must say that it also applies to the east coast. you don't see reloville's around boston. the land is expensive. corporate headquarters is one thing. that's right. that's right. okay. thank you very much. [applause] >> miriam greenberg is the author, tra "branding new york:w a city in crisis was sold to the world" is the book. what do you think? >> well, i think of new york in the post-world war ii period was in a position of preeminence really of the united states. it was when its fortunes were rising for a time. i think it was a famous kind of working-class city, to quote another book by joshua freeman. it was a city that had had a lot of business during world war ii, and its industries had been employing many, many new yorkers. and it was also a growing media capital. it was expanding its office infrastructure. it was growing in terms of the siding of the united nations. it was getting a lot of international attention in any way politically. and it was part of, you know, it was seen internationally as kind of the capital of a resurgent u.s. following world war ii. yes, very much a. so its star was rising in the. >> what happened in new york in the 1970s? >> well, it is a complicated question that has global national, local reasonings behind it. political, economic cultures. it was a period of crisis. on many levels. and it was a period that began really in the 1960s, the decline. and really reached in the mid '70s that had to do at the local level with a mismanagement of funds. and a fiscal crisis of the state that led to the city technically going bankrupt. and when i say a mismanagement of funds, and this is a complex story over which historians debate. it had to do with on the one hand the city government spending an enormous amount to build massive amounts of high-end private sector office space and residential buildings, as well as maintaining its level of social spending at a time when revenues were shrinking. and so that created a crisis for the city's budget. on the other hand, new york was not alone. there were many cities. it was a period in which cities across the country and indeed the world were facing bankruptcy, to deal with a global recession, to do with inflation, and stagflation as result of precession. it was a complex time and it was a time when the fortunes of cities in particular given the entrenchment of the federal government were put in this very difficult position. they were having to find new sources of revenue. >> was new york losing population in the '50s, 60s, 70s? >> the. there was services asian going on in new york and the surrounding suburbs. one thing that was occurring was the rise of suburbs more widely in the united states and the expansion of suburbs. and so there was a loss of population to the growing sunbelt region that was going on since the '50s. the west and southwest of the united states, and the sunbelt was also the base of a growing more conservative political movement of the country, which saw new york despite in this period its strength. saw it as reflecting an old guard form of civic populism if you will, that the republican party, the right-winger republican party was trying to supplant. and so new york was losing population to some extent as was finding itself in competition, in serious competition with other cities, that were more in, you know, in republican or the. >> your book, "branding new york: how a city in crisis was sold to the world," you talk about the crisis of the '70s and new york's response. how severe was the crisis as a response? >> a crisis of the '70s was extremely severe, as i mentioned. the city went into technical bankruptcy. as a result of which, and so i think a crisis on the one hand was produced by these local, national, global circumstances. it was a crisis that not only be felt new york but was produced as a result of the reaction to it. so it involved the position, which cut back social spending, things like fire protection and sanitation and education and vital city services, laid off thousands of public sector workers. led to the increased exodus of people and corporations and businesses from new york as a result of these cutbacks. so it was very, very severe. and to this day i think the reaction by the city, the degree of, you know, what some people might call some of the dark owning severity of the reaction has been questioned. >> what do you mean by that? >> i think it was kind of a calculus that, you know, where the priority should be placed by the city. i think the city essentially decided that under intense pressure from the ford administration, you know, there's the famous daily news headline, new york city, dropdead. which was something that ford was not always into newer, saying committee's cities in this sense, he didn't really say it, but they were saying in the sense that cities were no longer getting the kind of resources that they got under the model cities program in the '60s and the kind of municipal funding that they once got. and there was intense pressure on the city to kind of privatized into downsize its public spending. and to increase its competitiveness, and to attract new investments. as opposed to taking a route which would have involved trying to, you know, maybe similar to the approach of the middle part of the century and similar to what obama is talking about now, investing in a stimulus package. i think there was a calculus that what was, if one had to be lost, what could be lost was the kind of quality of life in order to bring in new funds into the city in the form of new corporate headquarters, tourism, a new upper-middle-class into the city. and so there was a whole restructuring of the priorities, the budget priorities, and ultimately new forms of incentives were provided for investment and relocation. relocation, and tourism. at the same time money was cut from social spending for existing residents, you, and workers of the city. >> and what was the effect today of those changes? >> i think it created what some people started to call actually already in the 1980s a kind of dual city. a city that was far more divided and unequal between classes. it created a city that was far more focused on the center, manhattan, as opposed to the suburbs. so i think it created a city that when i focus on in the book is how marketing and media were used in concert with these new priorities, these new political and economic priorities. is what also created a new kind of imaginary identity for new york. no longer was it this famed working-class capital. now it became really represented as a more easy to luxury type city and a cd that could be, you know, prominently placed an advertisement and association, products that wanted that kind of cachet. >> in fact, in your book, "branding new york," you talk about a very famous new york branch, i harcourt i love new york. what was the effect of that? >> i think that campaign had two phases. in the initial phase of that campaign, this famous campaign that was designed by milton glaser, the artistic director of new yorker magazine and a great graphic designer in his own right, i think that it really stimulated a kind of solidarity with new york and with new yorkers. and made people think about what would the essential qualities of new york that the love in which they would be really sore to lose. because when i say this was a severe crisis. i mean, there've were meaty and there was a lot of hype nationwide to the glee of some people that new york was going to cease to exist, and there were kind of satires about new york falling, sinking into the ocean. you know, the famous scene in planet of the apes in the final episode where, you know, you see the torch of the statue of liberty rising above the sand. so there were a lot of caricatures of the city and representations of new york in which the city ceases to exist. and i love new york, i heart new york rude responded to what was an exciting about that. i think for new yorkers. many new yorkers were more i heart new york t-shirt and embraced the campaign as a welcome months the nation. and add people identified with the i love new york with this idea, there was something in the urbanity and the cosmopolitan nature, the grittiness of the city, and i write about this was really playing around with the font of the campaign, a kind of gritty, newspaper style font and the softness of the heart in that juxtaposition. in the early newspaper -- sorry, print and television campaign featured prominently broadway stars in broadway shows from cats from khorasan, from what our remained to be some of the great, the great musicals and productions many which originated in the '70s and early '80s. and other things. and so there was also, no, characters from those performances gave their services for free or can so there's also a sense of great creativity and vitality of new york and association with broadway and times square. so that was kind of the first phase. i think in the second phase, this was a campaign that was launched by the state and not the city. so what was called the empire state development corporation, what was the department of commerce at the time. they kind of shifted focus largely away from this intense personal identification with new york and canada invocation of the crisis itself, too much more bland imagery of the shopping and downtown finance and the skyline of the city and association with the natural escape that you could have in the rest of new york state. and i think that was part of the planning all along. i think that early phase was so much limited to the crisis that people wanted that identification, and more later business develop a site of the campaign was what was focused on. so from the beginning i love new york was kind of the front stage of this deeper restructuring that i was talking about. into that became more and more clear as the campaign went on. and i actually also talk in the book about this transition of another side of the campaign that was less publicized that actually involved instead of having broadway stars perform, involve having ceos of major corporations talk about why they love new york. and they say, you know, there's a 30% tax break for relocation, i love new york. there is all of these kind of deals that they could, corporations could get, was the reason that they loved in new york. >> so what is new york's branded a? >> well, new york's brand, i think the islet new york was successful in many ways and was held up as perhaps one of the most recognized city marketing campaigns globally, and was copied enormously. so much so, and that was allowed in the early phase. it was allowed. it was not copyright until later and was allowed to kind of travel. and i think there was an effort following 9/11 to rebrand the city. i think there was a feeling among now new professionalized cohort of branders that the brand value of i heart new york have been watered down and they needed a new resonant kind of the brand in order to do the kind of economic development, business developer that they envisioned. and so they rebranded, immediately following with very patriotic imagery. and given the loss of the world trade center towers, which had figured prominently in a lot of the commercials, the skyline in particular, of this second phase of the i love new york campaign, that had to be completely revised. there was an intensive focus on the statue of liberty and the association of kind of a patriotic red, white and blue infiniti logo with the statue of liberty. so kind of a triumphant resurgent patriotic image. with bloomberg, there's been a shift again. in an interesting way. bloomberg has spoken about the need to see new york as a luxury city. and so there's been a lot of marketing along the lines of, you know, that was done in association with the effort to attract the olympics to new york, it was done in association with the republican national convention. that has been done in association with a lot of different events that have been hosted by a much larger beefed up professionalized marketing apparatus that has been produced under his administration. so there's been a lot of luxury like images that have been produced. and there's also been a new campaign caused this is new york, which interestingly associates about luxury image with a very kind of utopian vision of a diversity that kind of harkens back to the early days of i love new york. and i think that juxtaposition of kind of a longing, utopian longing with this luxury brand, is one of the things that makes these campaigns so successful. and allows people to not so think so critically of them. as i think they should. >> as a sociology professor at ucc and cruise, what are you writing a book called brainy new york? >> no, i recently relocated to santa cruz. not that i wouldn't have been interested otherwise, but i lived in new york for 20 years before it moved to california. and over the course of living in new york, i became very fascinated with sociology of the city, the history of the city. i was myself a media maker, the representation of the city. and i became fascinated with this period which i see is really formative, and the contemporary form that new york takes. and this strange juxtaposition on the one hand, you know, these druck owning cutbacks and on the other hand these investments in marketing the image of the city at the same time, new, resources for the livelihood of the city were being taken away. so i think that while in new york, that really fascinated me. and i've taken a fascination with me to california. and tried to convince people in santa cruz of the importance of this. and i think it has resonance because i think, you know, cities around the country when faced with crisis have a lot of these kind of decisions to make about how to represent themselves. >> miriam greenberg is the author, "branding new york: how a city in crisis was sold to the world" is the book. >> we are in new york city. the booth is based in washington, d.c., with margie ross, publisher president of the press. what do you have coming out this season by. >> were actually very excited about several of our books for summer and fall. and of course it's a good time to be a conservative publisher in shouldn't dc because there's a lot to talk about. our first book i will tell you about is a book by repeated best selling author, michelle malka. and this is a book called culture of corruption. is probably the first big anti-obama book coming from any publisher. and we think it's going to be very, very big. michelle milken has done a real investigative reporters job of looking at president obama, his team, who he is nominated, who he is brought into work with them, who has come from the corrupt city of chicago, and what they are up to. and i think the stores you really that she is going to tell is that unlike the promise of change and maybe some reform in shouldn't, government is up to the same old tricks. and you are not going to like what you hear when you hear about what's happening in the halls of government. >> another book coming out this fall, life after death, the evidence. that's another great to best selling author from dinesh d'souza. his last book from us was called what's so great about christianity. and this was a book that was a counter argument to all the anti-god books that come out a couple of years ago, dawkins and hitchens has been talking about. their argument that there was no rational basis for believing in god. and dinesh d'souza said quite the opposite if there is a reason for believing in god. this book takes up where that book left off. "life after death" talk about why it makes perfect sense logical sense to believe in heaven, the afterlife, miracles, and things that are not particularly consistent with the atheist point of view. and he takes a very logical rational approach to proving why it makes more sense to believe in the afterlife than to dismiss it as a fairytale. >> finally, mark fuhrman, the murder business,. >> another regular to best selling author. mark fuhrman did his very first book with us about 12 years ago. of course, that was the book that broke open the o.j. simpson murder case, and he was the lead police detective there. he has come back with a very, very interesting book. he of course known as an analyst of crime. and he has solved a lot of the biggest crimes that we have seen. he is a fox news contributor. he talks about detective work on tv. this book is partly a media bias book. the media's role, both complicit and accomplice in solving crimes but also in sort of obsession with crime as entertainment. and his point is that we probably have gone too far in treating crime as entertainment and reality tv, and how that gets in the way of solving crimes of investigators and police detectives doing their job and what it means for us as a society. so it should be a very interesting book, and hopefully another good bestseller. >> marjory ross, president and publisher. thanks a much.

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