It is a great honor to have been selected to speak to you reunion class members today. This is my class-s 50th reunion. At a recent birthday party ending in a zero, I was rather depressed at my long experience in general. [JOKE: BUT MY WIFE SAID, "NOT TO WORRY, TONY!"]

A reunion is a time for looking back over the years since we were at Carleton. What have we accomplished since then? What lessons have we learned? I can speak only for myself.

Underlying anything I have accomplished professionally have been two enduring realities in my private life. One is my Roman Catholic faith. I learned the hard way to defend it intellectually here at Carleton, because I was on a debate team consisting mainly of smart and aggressive agnostics. That faith has been a pillar of my existence.

A second pillar was my wife Kay, whom I married in graduate school, and the family we reared, which began shortly thereafter. We rapidly had four children, and later a fifth. They naturally absorbed a lot of my love, energy, and attention -- though not as much of my energy and attention as they should have, because I was rather a workaholic. Thank God for Kay's energy, self-reliance, love, and devotion to the duties of rearing a family!

If I have created any lasting legacy in my life beyond my family, it has come from my writing and speaking. I have written 20 books and 500 articles and made over 1,000 speeches. I mention these facts not to aggrandize myself, but because I want to reflect on how my personal experiences have influenced my thinking and writing, and what I have learned that might be of interest to you here today.

My first example is how student politics at Carleton helped me write my first, and most well- known, book, An Economic Theory of Democracy. It was my Ph.D. thesis at Stanford, which has been translated into several languages and has sold over 100,000 copies in the 45 years since it was published in 1957. That may not seem many copies in this day of Tom Clancy novels. But it dwarfs the sales of most Brookings Institution books. [JOKE: MOST BROOKINGS BOOKS ARE NOT VERY EXCITING READING]

When a Carleton junior, I ran for president of the Student Association. My motive was not to carry out any particular policies, just to win. However, I had to have a platform, so my friends and I invented ten planks I then promoted vigorously. This behavior was reflected in the basic idea in my thesis, which is that elected officials are motivated solely by the desire to be elected, not in order to carry out any particular policies. This seems obvious now, but it was a novel economic theory in the 1950s. Economists had previously assumed government officials unselfishly maximized public welfare.

After winning the election, I actually carried out all ten promises I had made. But no one at Carleton paid any attention, because those promises had no real impact on their lives. Offended at first, I gradually realized that their ignorance of my great achievements was entirely rational. It wasn't worth their time to become informed about what I had done.

This laid the foundation for a second hypothesis in my thesis: it is irrational for voters to become well-informed about the issues, mainly because the probability of each person's vote actually deciding the election is minuscule. Yet it is extremely costly in time and effort to get well-informed on the myriad issues facing the nation. If bearing that cost will not influence the outcome to your benefit, why do it?

It is worthwhile to vote, because voting is inexpensive and democracy will not work if most people don't vote. Then elected officials will not pay attention to the non-voter's desires. But becoming well informed is extremely costly. So most voters wisely don't do it. They are rationally ignorant. Political scientists had long noticed most citizens are amazingly ignorant about key issues, but they had blamed it on moral laziness. I showed it was a rational response to information costs. [JOKE: VOTERS NEEDED DISCIPLINE, WHICH IS IMPORTANT IN ALL ASPECTS OF LIFE. FARMER AND TWO TEENAGE-SONS USING PROFANITY]

These principles do not mean I think democracy is an ineffective institution; I believe it is the best form of government ever invented. But throughout my life, I have tried to pursue the truth realistically, even if it meant revealing unpopular aspects of things.

Shortly after finishing graduate school, I joined the Navy as an air intelligence officer, rather than being drafted. I served in a bomber squadron on an aircraft carrier, where I observed many layers of the military at work. At first, I thought the experience was a waste of time, though I did not mind donating three years to my country. But then the RAND Corporation asked me to study bureaucracy. I realized I had inadvertently become a bureaucracy expert.

So I wrote a book called Inside Bureaucracy. It is a theory of bureaucracy also based on the idea that officials act partly out of their own self interest. It is very germane to the current controversy over whether the FBI and CIA should have anticipated and prevented the Sept. 11 attack. I do not think that event was predictable by anyone.

Information flows in large bureaucracies have to be filtered and condensed as they pass up in the hierarchy, because otherwise the topmost officials would be buried in data. There are 32,000 people in the FBI. If each one sent whatever he or she found each day directly to the head of the agency, or even one of the top ten people, the top tier would be paralyzed by overload. It is absolutely essential for such an agency to screen, condense, and coordinate the zillions of data bits its members collect before passing those bits upward. [JOKE: TOO MUCH INFORMATION CAN BE DANGEROUS. LADY BUYS COLORFUL PARROT EDUCATED IN A BROTHEL.]

But such interpretation always takes time, involves judgment, and gives each official a chance to modify the result slightly, in part to serve his or her self-interest. So what arrives at the top may look very different from what is put in at the bottom.

The Phoenix FBI agent who noticed a lot of Arabs taking flying lessons produced one observation which -- after the fact -- seems crucially relevant. But before the fact, who could have known whether this bit was more relevant than any of the other 10,000 bits also being reported by other agents? The failure of the FBI to foresee what would happen is not a mark of incompetence, but of the inherent difficulty of screening huge amounts of data about uncertain future events in large organizations. With hindsight, we can connect the dots, but I do not think anyone could in advance.

Thus, all bureaucracies have inherent limitations based upon human nature. As with democracy, this does not mean bureaucracies cannot work or perform essential functions. They can, and we need them. But we should also be aware of their flaws, partly in order to devise better ways of overcoming or offsetting those flaws. [JOKE: BUREAUCRATS LIKE LAWYERS, WE DON'T LIKE THEM BUT NEED THEM. I LIKE TO HEAR IT!]

After leaving the Navy, I joined my father's consulting firm in Chicago in 1959 doing marketing and other analyses of real estate projects. Fortunately, I had a wonderful relation- ship with my father, "the boss;" we were also best friends, and I learned an immense amount from him. The rest of my writing has been mainly about urban affairs, influenced by my experiences in that firm for 18 years, and later at Brookings for 25 years. My remaining reflections are focused on subjects in that field.

Rather than being a pure academic, for 43 years I have worked directly on real-world problems and participated in the public policy dialog concerning them. This has given me a chance to have a voice in shaping urban policies, though not always successfully.

Of course, it would be naive for me to believe that simply writing a book proposing some controversial policy should result in immediate adoption of that policy. The process of generating political support for any policy in our huge democracy is long and complex, and I did not devote much energy to that process other than talking about my ideas in many forums. But I thought that was my specialized role, and so I hoped for the best. [JOKE: CAN'T DO EVERYTHING. LET'S GO UPSTAIRS AND MAKE LOVE.]

A formative influence was my participation on a secret task force on cities created by President Lyndon Johnson after the Watts, California, race riots in 1965. A small group of urban experts studied conditions in major U.S. cities for two years. In 1967, we reported to the President that there were likely to be more race riots in many cities if the appalling conditions in black ghettos were not addressed. But hobbled by the Viet Nam War, he completely suppressed our report, not even showing it to his own Secretary of HUD.

Almost immediately, race riots broke out in Detroit and Newark and many people were killed. So President Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission to publicly study the causes and possible remedies -- which his task force had already done, but secretly. Since I had just completed that study, I persuaded the director of the Kerner Commission to hire me as a consultant. I wound up writing drafts of 4 of 18 chapters in the Commission's report, which sold over 4 million copies. The report's most important impact was showing the police how to handle riots without killing people. In 1968, riots occurred in 150 cities after Martin Luther King was shot, but only King himself was killed.

This experience taught me two lessons that greatly influenced my writings. The first is that, for several reasons, most Americans want to live in neighborhoods where the other residents are not noticeably poorer than themselves. They fear poorer neighbors will reduce the values of their homes, which are their major assets. They also fear poorer people may raise local crime rates, lower the quality of public schools, and provide undesirable influences on their children. These views are often linked to the reluctance of most white Americans to live where there are more than about 25 to 33% African-American residents. That often causes racially integrated areas to become segregated.

These attitudes tend to generate a hierarchy of neighborhoods in each region based on socio-economic status. The wealthy live mainly with other wealthy, the middle-class with other middle-class, the working class with other working class. Each group maintains its position either by moving out when many lower income people move in, or -- in suburbs -- by imposing and supporting zoning and other rules that keep lower-cost housing from being built in their areas. [JOKE: BUILDING UP ASSETS TAKES TIME. SPIN THE BOTTLE]

Each of you knows that such a hierarchy exists in your own region, because you can readily name the best and the worst neighborhoods in it. In fact, most Americans believe this arrangement is perfectly reasonable and proper, since it is motivated by values widely-held throughout our society, and accepted by the poor as well.

But the unintended consequence is that the very poorest people in our society have to live mainly with other very poor people in older neighborhoods that become degraded by many maladies associated with severe poverty. These include high rates of crime, broken families, truancy, unemployment, and drug abuse. True, the desire of non-poor households to separate themselves from the poor is not the only cause of these maladies. Some causes lie in the behavior of those living there. [JOKE: NOT ALL PROBLEMS FROM POVERTY. 1 OUT OF 3 AMERICANS LEVELS SUFFERING FROM SOME TYPE OF MENTAL DISORDER.]

The second lesson I learned came from examining in detail the conditions in such areas of highly concentrated black poverty in our cities in the 1960s. That convinced me that there could be no real solution to the devastating problems of minority poverty in large cities as long as so many poor and deprived people were concentrated together in distressed communities. I still think so.

As a result, I felt conscience-bound to write a book in 1973 called Opening Up The Suburbs. I advocated subsidizing housing throughout almost all suburbs and helping some poor people move there from inner-city depressed areas -- a small fraction into each suburb -- in order to deconcentrate poverty in ghettos. That would give some poor people access to better schools, more jobs, and good neighborhoods, thereby helping them escape from terrible conditions in high-poverty neighborhoods. I thought this was in the long run the only way to counteract the harmful effects of big-city ghettos. [JOKE: PRIEST WITH LEAK IN CHURCH ROOF. MORAL OBLIGATIONS]

This recommendation was an expansion of ideas initially included in the Kerner Commission report. Both the original and my expansion were greeted with silence or overt hostility by most suburban residents, and even by big-city politicians, who did not want to lose constituents likely to support them. Most suburbanites did not want to accept even a few low-income neighbors, since many had moved out of cities to escape from high crime rates and poor schools they associated with the poor. And they thought allowing just a few newcomers in would soon attract many more.

In 1976, this policy was tried successfully in Chicago under a court order known as the Gautreaux program. Over 7,000 poor African-American households from Chicago public housing waiting lists were given vouchers to move to white suburban or outlying city neighborhoods. Their well-being was improved, and the quality of life of their new neighbors was not reduced. In New Jersey, the state Supreme Court recognized the duty of suburbs to provide affordable housing, and pressured the legislature into adopting the nation's only statewide housing strategy.

In 1994, 20 years after my book, my policy was also adopted experimentally in five regions by HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros in the "Moving to Opportunities Program". But few other areas have tried it because of local opposition.

The undesirable impacts of suburban exclusionary regulations are no longer confined to inner-city poor households. We are experiencing an increasing shortage in the U.S. of housing affordable not only to poor households, but also to many working-class and middle-class families. In the San Francisco Region, the median-priced existing home costs over $450,000; in Orange County, $360,000; in Boston, $350,000; in the New York area, $266,000; in Seattle, $243,000. Most households cannot afford such prices.

In all of those areas, shortages of rental housing units affordable to poor households are so acute that thousands of households are living doubled and tripled up. We are thus creating a whole new generation of slums to shelter the millions of households who cannot afford decent units. Yet home-owning residents of many suburbs persist in blocking creation of apartments or low-cost single-family housing in order to protect their home values and status. Each suburb pursues only its own self-interest. [JOKE: OVERCROWDING NOT ONLY HOUSING MALADY. INFESTATION OF MOTHS AND AMOROUS EXTERMINATOR.]

In this whole experience, I was compelled by my conscience to advocate policies that the vast majority of Americans strongly opposed B and still do. Their opposition is not motivated by immoral or illegitimate concerns, but by quite understandable ones. [JOKE: FEMINIST GENIE AND MAN WHO WANTS WIFE 30 YEARS YOUNGER]

Two more personal results came from my Kerner Commission work. In 1967, my father was supposed to speak to the annual black-tie Christmas fathers-and-sons banquet of the Commercial Club, Chicago's leading business club. But he had a heart attack, and the club asked me to speak instead. In that speech, I said it was shameful that this club of business leaders, in a city with a 30% black population, excluded black members -- hardly in keeping with the spirit of the most famous Father and His Son whose birthday we were celebrating. The next week, they changed the rules and admitted African-Americans.

In 1979, I attended a seminar at Notre Dame at which a Jesuit sociologist said that religion had its greatest social influence when small cells of lay people were active in society. So I started a group that met at Brookings to discuss how we could apply our religious principles in our professional and personal lives. It is still going after 23 years, with a revolving group of 6 to 10 people meeting at lunch every two weeks. It has been one of the joys of my life, and I recommend you start or join one yourself.

6. The last example of how my experiences influenced my writing involves something much more mundane -- but even more familiar to most of you. It is rising traffic congestion. In the late 1980s, I started writing a book called New Visions For Metropolitan America, which tried to connect the new issues generated by suburban sprawl with the big-city problems upon which I had long focused. This book was published in 1994.

In drafting this book, at first I included a chapter on traffic congestion. It soon grew to two chapters, then four. So I expanded it into a short separate volume entitled Stuck In Traffic, published in 1992. This book used a basic "law" of expressway congestion I had invented back in 1962, 30 years earlier. It says that during peak hours, congestion rises to exceed the capacity of any road, no matter how wide the road is. I am now writing a revised and updated version of Stuck In Traffic.

The most important things you should know about peak-hour traffic congestion are: (1) it is worst in very large regions or those with absolutely large growth, but not bad in small regions; (2) it is going to get worse all over the nation and the world, no matter what we do about it; (3) more public transit is probably desirable, but it will not "solve" existing congestion problems because there is no solution to those problems; since (4) traffic congestion is not really a problem, but a balancing mechanism we use to reconcile competing goals.

We have peak-hour congestion because so many people want to move during the same hours to pursue goals they value more than minimizing driving time. Those goals include having a wide range of choices of where to work and live, all working during about the same hours so we can interact at work efficiently, living in low-density settlements, and carrying out many errands on a single trip -- which is difficult on transit. Congestion is the mechanism that balances these goals. [JOKE: ALSO HAVE CONGESTION IN HEAVEN. TWO LINES OF MEN APPLYING]

There are some things we can do to reduce future increases in congestion, but none will eliminate those increases altogether. So my advice is: if you are often stuck in traffic, get yourself an air conditioned car with a stereo radio, tape deck, CD player, microwave, and telephone, and commute with someone you really like. Regard traffic jams as just part of your leisure life.

What personal conclusions have I reached as I reflect on all my past activities?

My most important achievement is that my wife Kay and I reared a family of five children, now including their spouses and 12 grandchildren. All of our children are smart, honest, hard-working, socially and economically productive, full of joy, and each has been happily married for at least 10 years. Unfortunately, Kay died of cancer after 42 years of marriage. But I was blessed enough to find a wonderful new wife in Darian. She calls me a "joy-seeking missile," and thanks to her, I have found it!

Second, I believe social progress depends in part upon well-known members of "the establishment" thoughtfully criticizing our dominant social, economic, and political institutions -- such as our neighborhood hierarchies -- when they unjustly harm people, even unintentionally, especially when those harmed are among the poorest and least powerful citizens. I have long regarded myself as such a critical voice in the arena of the nation's urban institutions. My ideas have been widely debated; some have been adopted, and some rejected. If such voices "crying in the wilderness" are realistic, objective, reasonable, perceptive, and -- above all -- persistent over time, they can make a difference.

My final conclusion is profound gratitude for my good fortune over the past 50 years. I have been blessed with a fine family, a challenging and stimulating career, intellectual recognition, and material success. Yes, I have worked hard, as I did at Carleton too. But I have been fortunate beyond anything I deserved or earned. For that I must thank my parents, my two wonderful wives, the fact that I live in America, and -- of course -- my Carleton education! Above all, I am grateful to the Lord who made us all and acts as a powerfully positive force in the lives of those who follow Him. I hope He has blessed you, too, and will continue to do so in the years ahead.