conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about York, Europe, Times with the genre: New, Used & Rental Textbooks, Social Sciences?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Ill Fares the Land'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Ill Fares the Land
  Railways are different. Trains were already the symbol of modern life by the 1840s—hence their appeal to 'modernist' painters from Turner to Monet. They were still performing that role in the age of the great cross-country expresses of the 1890s. Electrified tube trains were the idols of modernist poets and graphic artists after 1900; nothing was more ultra-modern than the new, streamlined super-liners that graced the neo-expressionist posters of the 1930s. The Japanese Shinkansen and French TGV are the very icons of technological wizardry and high comfort at 190 mph today.
  Trains, it would seem, are perennially contemporary—even if they slip from sight for a while: in this sense, any country without an efficient rail network is in crucial respects 'backwards'. Much the same applies to railway stations. The gas 'station' [sic] of the early trunk road is an object of nostalgic affection when depicted or remembered today, but it has been serially replaced by functionally updated variations and its original form survives only in fond recall. Airports typically (and irritatingly) linger well past the onset of aesthetic or functional obsolescence; but no one would wish to preserve them for their own sake, much less suppose that an airport built in 1930 or even 1960 could be of use or interest today.
  Stations are not an adjunct to modern life, or part of it, or a by-product of it. Like the railway they punctuate, stations are integral to the modern world itself. The topography and daily life of cities from Milan to Mumbai would be unimaginably altered if their great railway termini suddenly disappeared. London would be unthinkable (and unlivable) without its Underground—which is why the humiliatingly unsuccessful attempts of the New Labour governments to privatize the Tube tell us so much about their attitude to the modern state at large. New York's very lifeblood flows through its ramshackle but indispensable subway network.
  We too readily assume that the defining feature of modernity is the individual: the non-reducible subject, the freestanding person, the unbound self, the un-beholden citizen. This unattached individual is favourably contrasted with the dependent and deferential subject of the pre-modern world. There is something to this account: 'individualism' may be the cant of our time but for good and ill it speaks to the connected isolation of the wireless age. However, what is truly distinctive about modern life is not the unattached individual. It is society. More precisely civil—or (as the 19th century had it) bourgeois—society.
  Railways remain the necessary and natural accompaniment to the emergence of civil society. They are a collective project for individual benefit. They cannot exist without common accord and, in recent times, common expenditure: by design they offer a practical benefit to individual and collectivity alike. This is something neither the market nor globalization can accomplish—except by happy inadvertence. Railways were not always environmentally sensitive—though in overall pollution costs the steam engine did less harm than its internally-combusted competitor—but from their earliest days, they were and had to be socially responsive. That is one reason why they were not very profitable.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me two more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek. Others have spent the last three decades methodically unraveling and destabilizing them: this should make us much angrier than we are. It ought also to worry us, if only on prudential grounds: why have we been in such a hurry to tear down the dikes laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?
  To abandon the labors of a century is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come. It would be pleasing—but misleading—to promise that social democracy, or something like it, represents the future that we would paint for ourselves in an ideal world. But this would be to return to discredited story-telling. Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past. But among the options available to us today, it is better than anything else to hand.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last three paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Until the late '80s, it was quite uncommon to encounter promising students who expressed any interest in attending business school. Indeed, business schools themselves were largely unknown outside of North America. Today, the aspiration—and the institution—are commonplace. And in the classroom, the enthusiasm of an earlier generation for radical politics has given way to blank mystification. In 1971 almost everyone was, or wanted to be thought, some sort of a 'Marxist'. By the year 2000, few undergraduates had any idea what that even meant, much less why it was once so appealing.
  So it would be pleasing to conclude with the thought that we are on the brink of a new age, and that the selfish decades lie behind us. But were my students of the 1990s and after truly selfish? Assured from all quarters that radical change lay in the past, they saw around them no examples to follow, no arguments to engage and no goals to pursue. If the purpose of life as lived by everyone you see is to succeed in business, then this will become the default goal of all but the most independent young person. As we know from Tolstoy, "[t]here are no conditions of life to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees them accepted by everyone around him."
  In its last year of operation, 1994, state-owned British Rail cost the taxpayer £950 million ($1.5 billion). By 2008, Network Rail, its semiprivate successor company, cost taxpayers £5 billion ($7.8 billion).