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> Flat roofs always leak. “Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded goo
by poszlem 2y ago
> Flat roofs always leak.
“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.” - Thomas Sowell
funny how that applies in other areas of life.
- darby_nine 2y agoSomehow I suspect that people have been saying this about flat roofs dozens, maybe hundreds, of generations before Sowell was born. It's not like multiple roof-types are a 20th century invention....
- wongarsu 2y agoHowever we used to build houses in very regional styles. Flat walkable roofs in the middle east where it barely rains. Angled roofs in rainy Europe. Steeply angled roofs in snowy Sweden and Norway. Constructions that encourage drafts to form in houses in the Southern US. Now, especially in the US, we just build the same types of houses everywhere.
- fwip 2y agoFurther context for that quote (from 1993): "Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them." So how much you agree with the applicability of the quote might depend on whether, say, you think the education and race relations in 1993 were better or worse than they were in 1963.