Review: Democracy by Decree

In 1982 ten prisoners in Philadelphia's Holmesburg prison filed a federal suit against the city's mayor, Wilson Goode, and charged him with violating their constitutional rights, specifically the 8th Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment, due to the supposed squalid state of the city's jail. Mayor Goode began negotiations with the plaintiffs' attorneys to see if an agreement could be reached.

The Philadelphia District Attorney, Ronald Castille, however, was not named in the suit, and was therefore not involved in the negotiations. When he got word that Goode was considering making a deal that capped the number of prisoners in city jails he was understandably concerned. The DA was charged with overseeing public safety, but if Goode's agreement with the attorneys went into effect, hundreds or thousands of the people he helped convict would be released immediately onto the city streets. He asked the judge to allow him to intervene in the case, but to no avail. Goode's deal with the attorneys went into effect, and almost all new suspects who came before city courts were immediately released on bail.

The mayor of Philadelphia would not typically have the authority to release thousands of prisoners without the agreement of the city council or the state legislature, but when Goode signed a "consent decree" with the Plaintiff's attorneys, which was then ratified and codified by a federal judge, he became the sole representative of the state and local government and acquired the power to do anything he imagined feasible to remedy the supposed constitutional defects of the jail. Other elected officials, both at the time and after he left office, would have to pay the cost, but for now he alone handed control of the Philadelphia prison system into the hands of a federal judge and a group of crusading attorneys who were required to "supervise" the decree.

Within months the number of fugitives in the city leaped from 18,000 to 50,000. Almost 10,000 of these were re-arrested for new crimes only to be put back on the streets once again. While on the streets these released fugitives murdered 79 people, committed almost a 1000 robberies, and were involved in 1,113 assaults. One car thief, who had already been arrested twice and then released on bail both times, shot and killed a twenty-one year old rookie cop who was trying to prevent him from stealing yet another car.

For six long years the federal judge would hold the city to the consent decree requiring release of prisoners, even citing the city for contempt, even after a new mayor, Ed Rendell, came to power and argued that he was unconscionably burdened by the agreement of his predecessor. The federal judge who had released the prisoners and who now supervised the Philadelphia jails was convinced that he had done a good job, and sincerely believed that the agreement signed under his watch needed no modification.

This is a perfect example of the dangers of runaway consent decrees, as documented by Ross Sandler and David Schoenbrod in their fine book, Democracy by Decree: What Happens When Courts Run Government.

Sandler and Schoenbrod meticulously demonstrate how state and local governments in America today are hobbled by hundreds of consent decrees. Consent decrees run local jails in all fifty states and state prisons in 41. Almost all fifty states also have school districts, mental institutions, and foster care programs under a myriad of different consent decrees, many of them signed decades ago by politicians long out of office. These decrees are managed and supervised by a select group of judges, plaintiffs' attorneys, and bureaucrats, who, unknown to the general populace, work behind closed doors to run some of the most crucial functions of modern government.

In New York City, for instance, consent decrees twenty-years old or older decide how the city runs homeless shelters, public housing, special education, foster care, its Rikers Island jail, and other institutions. These are some of the city's most important duties, but at this point their management is almost completely out of the hands of any currently elected official. Any modifications to these abstruse and elaborate decrees, which have in the past been detailed enough, for instance, to mandate the number of nutritious snacks at schools, demands intensive background negotiations with the "public interest" plaintiffs' attorneys. These attorneys are understandably reluctant to relinquish their power given that they have become the unelected leaders of numerous city departments. More importantly, they are typically paid, by order of the judge, for every hour of these negotiations by the city itself, usually at their princely hourly attorney rates. Some attorney groups have brought home almost half a million dollars in a single year just for "supervising" a consent decree.

The authors trace the origins of the modern consent decree to the noble crusade to desegregate schools following the Brown decision in 1955. To insure an equitable balance of races, courts began managing school districts with tens of thousands of children based on early consent decrees between the NAACP and local school boards. Courts and public interest lawyers became involved in delicate issues about districting and application procedures that were entirely outside their previous experience. There were some marked successes and some notable failures in this endeavor. Yet after Congress began legislating "soft rights" (such as a vague though absolute right to "clean water" and "honest government") and inserting "citizen suit provisions" (beginning with the Clean Air Act of 1970) into federal laws, courts began expanding into more and more areas, defending what the new breed of public interest lawyers called the "new property."

This revolutionary concept meant a citizen's right to demand certain actions from the government was in some ways analogous to older conceptions of personal property that courts typically defended. By this concept an individual could file a lawsuit demanding that the government maintain the environment or distribute welfare checks or manage prisons in a more humane manner, and courts would rule on these suits and apply remedies just like they used to do for cases about trespassing and adverse possession. This "new property" concept, though, was much more complex and slippery than the old property, and while defending this concept courts sank deeper and deeper into the policy morass of a thousand different areas of government, areas in which they had no expertise and no democratic legitimacy. The results were lamentable.

For one, the decrees often expanded far beyond their original stated intent to remedy a specific failure to abide by federal law. Sandler and Schoenbrad extensively document the notable case of Jose P.

In 1979 lawyers for Jose P., a deaf elementary school student, brought suit against the New York City Board of Education for failing to place Jose in a special education program after three-months time. The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1975 made broad, unquantifiable requirements about evaluation of children in need of special education (a typical "soft right") that Jose's lawyers claimed the city violated. After a short hearing Judge Eugene Nickerson granted a preliminary injunction against the Board of Education and required them to evaluate and place children who needed special education quickly. A simple enough remedy. He then, however, appointed a "special master" to supervise the schools, formulate precise guidelines for the order, and negotiate a detailed consent decree with the city. Soon, without so much as a hearing, Judge Nickerson placed another, much broader, special education suit under that master's supervision, and required him to rule on remedies for that case as well. This special master was basically given the power to reshape New York's entire special education system to his own will, although nobody had elected him or put him into a definiable office. Of course, the prospect of re-engineering the entire system sub rosa attracted other litigants to Judge Nickerson's door. Soon, a complaint by the Puerto Rican Defense Fund led to their inclusion in negotiations, followed quickly by the Public Education Association, and then, not to be left out, Advocates for Children of New York. Almost ten years later a group of lawyers filing under the new Americans with Disabilities Act was incorporated into the case without any new hearing.

These public interest lawyers were all authorized to appear in hearings before the special master, and together they all became a kind of parliament for New York's special education system, negotiating and deciding on policies for the entire city, all while earning literally millions in hourly fees for their burden. The original decree became just a starting point for decades of further negotiations. Their detailed plans for the city were never published, or scrutinized, but soon they were deciding exactly how long an evaluation for special education should take, how long it should take to place a child in a certain program, how much money should be spent on psychologists, teachers, and training, and how much taxes should be raised to pay for it all. After 30 years of effort, they still claim that the city needs their supervision due to its continuing "malfeasance," which, of course they don't assume any responsibility for. Under their supervision, special education jumped from a small percentage of total spending to 25% of the city's education budget, yet few today would uphold New York's sprawling special education program as a model. All of it though is under the judge's and the plaintiff's murky control, with no end in sight. This all emerged from the case of a single child who putatively suffered a delayed placement into special ed over 30 years ago.

There is almost no way to justify these actions as legal. It was and is nothing less than the usurpation of government by a select group of judges and lawyers. What is perhaps most surprising, though, as this book shows, is how incredibly common, almost mundane, this story has become.

Sandler and Schoenbrod skillfully analyze why consent decrees are so plentiful today and why they have become so entrenched. These decrees provide judges and lawyers with interesting and meaningful work distinct from the typical endless parade of petty cases. Some elected officials also get used to deflecting blame onto a non-elected body. They also allow executive branch bureaucrats to sign off on agreements that often end up increasing their own agency's budget (even when they are supposed to be opposing the lawsuit). These bureaucrats often understand that judicially supervised decrees can protect them and their department from the typical rounds of budget cuts by mandating spending levels. When New York City found that social workers added little to special education screening procedures under the Jose P. case (the city was already required to have psychologists and professional evaluators to decide if a child had special needs), Judge Nickerson inexplicably allowed social worker unions to intervene in the case to protect their jobs. They too became part of the tight clique of special education negotiators. Once they were included, the judge demanded that the city hire 90 more, and these, of course, became vigorous lobbyists for the continuance of the decree. There is here, as elsewhere, a new iron triangle of complicity in ending democratic government that should be disturbing to every citizen. These groups remain entrenched and powerful, and Sandler and Schoenbrad do not give much hope that they can be easily removed.

But maybe the times are a-changing. Just this year the Supreme Court, in Horne v. Flores, struck a blow against these endless and expanding consent decrees. Justice Samuel Alito wrote that to be released from a consent decree a government merely had to show that it was abiding by the original federal statute, and not every particular requirement that somehow made it into a consent decree over the years. Thanks to the Supreme Court's intervention, the state of Arizona will not have to raise taxes to fund a judicially-determined level of bi-lingual education. Perhaps other states and cities can now use the decision to escape the grasp of these arbitrary decrees. Perhaps the people can begin to decide again how to run their own schools, adoption systems, and housing programs.

Both Justice Alito, in his opinion, and Justice Stephen Breyer, in his dissent, explicitly cited Democracy by Decree as informing their opinion on the case. This means, though, that they both read the authors' list of previous Supreme Court cases that aimed to end or restrict these eternal decrees, and how they failed in that purpose. As the authors show, district court judges have relied on their relative obscurity to continue these decrees in the face of Supreme Court precedent. As I've discussed recently, Westchester County was just browbeat by the federal government into a historic housing consent decree that forces it to produce millions of dollars worth of affordable housing (see also this City Journal article for more background).

If history is any guide, we'll be dealing with these unelected leaders for some time to come.

(Another book review: here.)

Mayoral Election Rundown

Election day is over, and despite the rotten economy an overwhelming number of mayoral incumbents held onto their seats.

Bloomberg squeaked by in New York City, 51 to 46. Apparently his aides knew how close this would be all along, but feared announcing it to the world would bring down the big guns. They did get Geoffery Canada to keep Obama out though. Dave Bing won again in Detroit, which means the city is actually being run by someone with business experience and without a criminal record. Luke Ravenstahl, the incumbent mayor of Pittsburgh, all of 29 years old, won handily against Acklin, the graybeard of the race at 31, and Harris, 30 years old. In Minneapolis Rybak, with the endorsement of all 13 city council members, took almost 75% of the votes in a 10 way race. St. Paul's incumbent, Chris Coleman, held on too. Ohio incumbents won in Cleveland and Cincinnati. In other news, Menino is officially crowned king of Boston. All except Bloomberg, who is nominally a Republican, and Coleman, who is nominally independent, are Democrats.

In the open races there were few surprises. In Miami Tomas Regaldo won solidly on a promise to stop development (he may be a little behind the curve on that one). Anthony Foxx did upset the polls, however, to become Charlotte's first Democratic mayor in 22 years. Seattle's non-partisan race is still too close to call, but McGinn, who flip-flopped on the only theme of his campaign (he originally promised to stop the Alaska Way Viaduct, now he says he won't), has a slight lead. Houston is going to a runoff, and so is Atlanta, which means that Houston may elect an openly gay mayor, and Atlanta may elect a white one. So there may be potential surprises in the future.

Also, check out this Wall Street Journal article on an odd mayoral race in Lewis Run, Pennsylvania, population 573.

For a complete rundown of the major races, see the U.S. Conference of Mayors' tally sheet.

Sundry Links

1. The Washington Post has a fantastic series on the peculations of AIDS nonprofits in the city. I thought the shady dealings of Peaceoholics uncovered by The Washington City Paper would be the best D.C. outrage story of the year, but this tops it. D.C.'s AIDs coordinator Debra Rowe, who was formerly convicted of heroin possession and distribution, awards millions in AIDs housing grants to a group called Miracle Hands, founded by Cornell Jones, who spent 9 years behind bars for running one of America's largest cocaine markets. Not surprisingly, Jones's group blows the money and warehouses AIDs victims in homes without electricity and heat. They also managed to spend half a million on a job center that never opened, all while Jones put Rowe's father and uncle on security detail at the nightclub he operated next door to his non-profit group. He also employed her son directly for the non-profit she was awarding grants to. There's so much more.

2. In more DC-area news, the Post highlights the failures of Maryland's Smart Growth program (yeah, the original one), and Washington City Paper has yet another great piece, this one on recycling, or the lack of it, in the District.

3. Lawrence Halprin dies. He was one of America's truly great landscape architects. He designed everything from the pedestrian mall in Charlottesville (beautiful), to Ghiradelli Square in San Francisco (unbelievably lucrative), to Freeway Park in Seattle. New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable described Freeway Park as the most important public space since the Renaissance. Halprin will be missed.

4. Houston's Light Rail disaster: I've done a few blogs on light-rail recently, and specifically Houston's light-rail, but here's a good look at the ridership numbers. After diverting billions of dollars from buses to rail, Houston was able to both increase its costs and lower its ridership. Good job Houston.

5. Also, the Houston Chronicle has been trying to push zoning on Houston's unwilling citizens for decades now. Here's an article that claims the city's citizens have finally caved into their blandishments. You'd think after 6 previous referendum rejections the zoning advocates would give up, but planners are persistent. This time they might actually win.

6. Buffet puts an unimaginable $44 billion dollars into the freight rail company Burlington Northern Santa Fe. He calls it a bet on America's future. It's also a bet on America's successful freight railroad system, which has actually been the most profitable sector of the economy this year. And, unlike much transportation in the US, they live entirely without government subsidies. This is perhaps why they carry almost 40% of the freight tonnage in America, while in Europe, which pushes and subsidies rail passenger lines, railroads barely carry ten percent of freight. All that European freight is lost just to increase passenger rail to 6% of total travel. And yet they're supposed to be the green ones.

7. I've never heard of this program before, but Neil Peirce at Citiwire documents the strange case of Barcelona@22. Barcelona, Spain apparently allows landowners in some downtown city blocks to vote on the possibility of rebuilding their block at higher densities. In exchange they have to give up a third of their land for parks, housing, and technology-based jobs centers. I'm skeptical about such programs, but it is an interesting arrangement.

8. After opening to such fanfare it looks like Paris's Velib bike-sharing program is destined for the scrap-heap. Vandals have stolen or destroyed around 80% of the bikes. What's most surprising is that the French commentators seem to agree that much of the destruction is political, done by second-generation immigrants who come into the city from the suburban banlieus and who resent the ecological-mindedness of trendy downtowners. So this is actually a cautionary tale about restrictive building codes which limit building heights in European cities and therefore turn downtown into an enclave of the elite. France managed to turn biking into an a snob activity.

LA's Rail Debacle

The modern light-rail resurgence has been part of a wider trend towards more rail investment in American cities. But commuter and heavy rail can be just as dangerous and inefficient as light-rail, as Los Angeles's experience shows.

L.A.'s Metrolink is a commuter train, not a light-rail, but its on-grade crossings are almost as dangerous as any light-rail system, and for all of the same reasons. In the previous 15 years Metrolink has caused an astounding 244 deaths. The freight railroads which use the line, and which are not subsidized by the government, don't cause this sort of havoc, unless of course they come into contact with a Metrolink. It's another good reason to leave fixed rails to transporting heavy goods and instead keep people mobile through buses, cars, and bikes.

These hundreds of deaths have not been bought cheap either. Ever since LA's residents passed Proposition A in 1980, their far-flung city has tried to build a far-flung rail network, with a notable lack of success. LA's rail-riders garner subsidies 3 to 8 times those of bus-riders. Metrolink's capital and operations cost an astounding $18 dollars per passenger, while the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) heavy-rail systems like the Blue and Green line cost anywhere from $6 to 13 dollars a ride. MTA buses cost only about $1.17 per passenger. So, how did the MTA deal with this obvious disparity? It cut efficient bus lines that "competed" with the the inefficient rail system, and instituted a cheaper "flat fare" for rail riders instead of the fare measured by distance for bus riders.

And it actually "taxed" bus riders to pay for these rail boondoggles. About 40% of the cost of construction of the original Blue Line (finished in 1990) was paid for by substantially raising bus fares, which caused a loss of about 96 million bus riders per year. The newly subsidized Blue Line now carries a grand total of 17 million passengers annually, about 1/5 those lost to buses. (Over the same period MTA paid over a million dollars to lobbyists in Washington to secure federal transit money for its new Red Line to North Hollywood. Congress, led by Harry Waxman, approved funding for the line.)

Perhaps the most inexcusable aspect of all these subsidies is the inequity. In the mid-1990s, while these fare increases were taking place, bus riders were 83% minority and more than half earned less than $15,000 per year, while 72% of the MTA's commuter rail line riders were white and earned over $60,000 a year. LA was giving by far the greatest subsidies to wealthy-white suburbanites, and they were taking them right from poor inner-city minority bus riders.

This led to the 1994 lawsuit against the MTA by the Bus Riders Union, which accused the MTA, with some merit, of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act against the discriminatory application of public services. The 1996 consent decree required the re-institution of the old monthly fare and held bus price increases to inflation. Still, the inequity and inefficiency remains.

This is not a story about how putatively low-density Los Angeles is an inappropriate setting for heavy-rail and transit. Actually, at over 7,000 people per square mile, LA is the densest metropolitan area in the nation, and it has the second-greatest number of total transit passengers, behind, of course, New York. It's buses today have the highest "load rate" (passengers to seats) in the nation.

Buses in LA can and do work. Rail doesn't. Or, as the recently departed urban economist John Meyer and his progeny succinctly put it, "Bus good, train bad."

On-Grade Rails and the Streetcar Conspiracy

I've already blogged about the expense and dangers of light rail, but here's a great video showing the obvious difficulties Houston's light rail system is having while traveling on-the-grade of city streets (ht Paul).

Many, including, not surprisingly, the Houston Metro system, have blamed the drivers for these accidents. Admittedly, as you can see, most accidents involve drivers taking left turns without examining the next lane or just plain ignoring oncoming trains. But since trains arrive much less frequently than cars along a similar lane, there will always be less of an impetus to carefully check the lane when turning to the side. Drivers are also used to dealing with other cars which can brake suddenly and which can swerve out of the way of oncoming traffic. The light rail provides much slimmer reaction time for nearby motorists while turning. As the numbers show, fixed on-grade rail is an obvious safety hazard, no matter who's at fault.

These are just a few of the reasons the country at large abandoned streetcars for buses back in the 1950s and 60s. Everyone at the time understood that they were more costly, more dangerous, and less maneuverable. But by the 1970s a mythology about a golden era of streetcars emerged in their absence. Rabble-rousing attorney Bradford Snell perpetuated the myth, in books and in congressional committee hearings, that General Motors succeeded in a nefarious conspiracy to destroy the once-beloved streetcar industry. After the 1973 oil crisis, these claims gave the public a convenient scapegoat and a comforting story of lost innocence.

In fact, the General Motors subsidiary National City Lines did buy up some streetcar lines in a few cities, but, as Robert Bruegmann points out in Sprawl: A Compact History, cities gave up their streetcars whether or not General Motors bought any of their lines. In L.A., whose myth about the conspiracy was memorialized in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, there were actually two old streetcar lines, the Red and the Yellow. General Motors only bought up one, but both switched to buses in the post-war period. In the famous antitrust case of United States v. National City Lines (1948), much cited by Snell and other conspiracy theorists, GM was convicted of conspiracy and restraint of trade but was charged only $5,000 for their crime. What Snell and many others failed to point out, however, was that GM was not charged with monopolizing or destroying the streetcar industry, but with trying to monopolize the bus industry. It was charged with forcing its subsidiary to buy only GM buses, hardly an unprecedented act for a corporate parent. Also, as Jon Teaford points out in The Rough Road to Renaissance, many of the lines that replaced streetcars with buses were actually municipally owned. The New York City Board of Transportation spent millions in the 1940s to replace its old trolleys with efficient buses, while the Chicago Transit Authority and the Detroit Department of Street Railways removed the last trolleys from their city's streets in the late 1950s. The city of Chicago boasted that "Comfortable, easy-riding buses are being substituted for rattletrap streetcars that should have been derailed at the scrap heap years ago."

But just twenty years later, the combined power of amnesia and faddish planning theories succeeded in bringing the streetcar back, beginning with San Diego's system in 1981. We're all paying for it now.

"The police or the mayor, they don't tell us what to do. God tells us what to do."

Those are the words of a man, Ronald Moten, whose unfortunately named non-profit "Peaceoholics" received over $10 million dollars in D.C. government grants. Moten also claims that "we don’t work for the government; the government works for us." At least we know the money hasn't bought him off. The problem is that is doesn't seem to have bought much of anything.

These great quotes and many others are brought to you courtesy of the always impressive Washington City Paper. Thanks to them we finally have an in-depth view of the intricately convoluted, back-scratching world of non-profit youth "rehabilitation." In D.C. government-land, three different city departments each award multi-million dollar grants to Peaceoholics with almost no documentation, no contracts, and no-check up, all while ex-convicts are inexplicably placed in charge of teenagers and at-risk youth. The D.C. government hoped that it could gain access to the gangs that Peaceoholics barters with while reforming those marginal ex-convicts and gang members who might think of returning to respectable life. Not surprisingly, things go awry, and one of the "mentors" is soon charged by numerous teenagers with sexual abuse. The peace-loving organization mocks the accusers in and outside of court.

The problem with the government trying to social engineer the ghetto by buying access to it is that the stodgy city politicians cannot possibly understand what they are trying to influence. Just like the Community Action Program in the 1960s, throwing millions of dollars into poor but complex inner-city hierarchies can only lead to chaotic disruption. When these government-funded non-profit groups begin trading on their "access" to dangerous criminals and gangs, everyone should be aware that those groups have to maintain their access through the same kind of power games the gangs themselves use. The gangs associate because they believe that they can get money, protection, and power. The same story always plays out. The line between the government, the non-profit, and the gangs quickly becomes blurry, and the government ends up embarrassed and temporarily chastened when it discovers that its been funding a criminal enterprise after all.

Just look at Jeff Fort in Chicago, whose Blackstone Rangers gang remade themselves as a voter registration organization and received a million dollars in federal grants before being investigated by a Senate Committee in 1970 for directing the funds towards drugs and gang activities. They eventually even tried to contract with the Libyan government to commit terrorist acts in the U.S for cash. Of course, originally, Fort "seemed like such a sincere young man." Or consider the case of the Chicago Conservative Vice Lords, whose leaders received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Rockefeller Foundation for their "community organizing" group before it was discovered that they too were directing a criminal enterprise with the funds. One of their leaders was convicted of murder in 1970 (or, as the group's seemingly official webpage puts it, "Bobby Gore did not commit the murder, however, the jury thought he did and he was convicted"). More recently, an LA city councilman admitted to providing $5,000 for a gang intervention group whose leader, not surprisingly, was named as an associate of the MS-13 gang in a federal indictment. Everywhere and always it is the same misplaced hope in reform through cash payments.

Although Peaceoholics founder Ron Moten doesn't seem to be involved in these sort of blatantly illegal shenanigans, it is clear from the article that he used city money to lobby for lighter sentences for hardened gang members, doubtless to protect his cred among these groups. It is also clear that his ex-cons inexplicably became the lead investigators in some city crime scenes. When a police officer was asked who is in charge at the scene of a shooting, he replies, "Probably that dude from Peaceoholics; he's the big boss around here." He adds that that dude isn't telling his officers anything. Of course this isn't what the government originally intended; the abdication of police responsibilities to a shadowy non-profit, but once Peaceoholics had the access...

One Peaceoholics member admitted that the police were jealous because "We don’t necessarily tell them what we know. But we lookin’ out for public safety.” I'm sure they can be trusted.

Of course, in the grand tradition of urban giveaways, Moten's totally inexperienced group of ex-cons was also granted millions in cheap loans to develop "affordable housing," which it will doubtless pass on to a real developer so it can pocket the difference. Once the housing is built though, Peacoholics can then use it as a carrot to reward its own supporters and lobbyists with cheap apartments. (Yet another example, in case one was needed, of how affordable housing continues to be the greatest un-discussed boondoggle in urban government.)

It is clear that Moten was building a political power-base among the gangs using government money. The money and the surreptitious government support allowed him to reward friends, punish enemies, and create his own powerful business network, at least it did before it all fell apart with the sexual abuse case. No worry though. Moten promises to "pursue community activism, business ventures, and consulting opportunities in other cities." It's all of a piece.

The Power Law and City Growth

A recent study claims that interconnections in human cities mimic the interconnections in the human brain.

The study doesn't claim that cities mirror the brain's geography or its layout, but they supposedly mimic the brain's rate of growth of interconnections. These interconnections are measured, somewhat surprisingly, in terms of highways and exit ramps for cities and pyramidal neurons and synapses for brains. The researchers say that the number of both highways in cities and neurons in the brain increases with surface area at a 3/4 power, while highway exit ramps and synapses increase at a 9/8 power. This supposedly shows the efficiency of large cities and large brains. The hardware or infrastructure becomes more efficient as cities and brains grow, and the interconnections become more dense. The larger it is, the more brains and cities can get out of less.

I've already addressed problems with using power law functions to describe cities. The main issue is that millions of things in both the natural and man-made world organize themselves into power law (or exponent) functions, from the use of English words to the organization of galaxies. The somewhat odd choice of variables for comparison (why are exit ramps like synapses? why not intersections in general?) also makes it look like the researchers cherry-picked their subjects to find a correlation. The fact that researchers could find a similar power law function in two disparate fields actually proves very little about either brains or cities.