Resources
Overview
This page collects links to primary sources, datasets, organizations, media, and further reading relevant to the themes of The Greatest Shortcoming.
Al Bartlett: Lectures and Writings
- “Arithmetic, Population and Energy” (lecture, various versions) — The original lecture in its most widely circulated form is available on YouTube. CU Boulder Libraries maintains an archive of earlier versions.
- CU Scholar: Bartlett’s publications — CU Boulder’s institutional repository includes Bartlett’s academic articles and some unpublished materials.
- The Essential Exponential! — Bartlett’s collected writings on exponential growth, published by UNL.
Boulder History and Planning
- City of Boulder Open Data — Zoning maps, land use data, building permits, and demographic data for Boulder.
- Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan (BVCP) — Boulder’s primary long-range planning document; earlier versions (1977, 1989, 2010) are particularly relevant to the book.
- Colorado State Archives — Historical records including Boulder City Council minutes and planning documents.
- Carnegie Branch Library for Local History (Boulder) — Boulder-specific historical newspaper clippings, photographs, and planning records.
Housing and Affordability Data
- Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies — Annual State of the Nation’s Housing reports with national and metro-level affordability data.
- Zillow Research Data — Historical home value and rent indices at city and zip code level, freely downloadable.
- Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) — Economic data including housing cost indices, vacancy rates, and homeownership rates.
- HUD USER Research Data — HUD-maintained datasets on housing costs, fair market rents, and subsidized housing.
- National Low Income Housing Coalition: Out of Reach — Annual report on the gap between wages and fair market rents across every U.S. county.
Demographic and Census Data
- U.S. Census Bureau — Decennial census and American Community Survey (ACS) data on population, race, income, housing tenure, and more.
- NHGIS (National Historical Geographic Information System) — Historical census data with GIS boundaries, essential for longitudinal analysis.
- Social Explorer — Web interface for historical census data with mapping and data export.
- IPUMS USA — Harmonized microdata from the U.S. Census and ACS for individual-level demographic analysis.
Immigration and Population Policy
- Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) — FAIR’s own publications; compare with SPLC analysis for context.
- Southern Poverty Law Center: Extremist Files — SPLC’s documentation of anti-immigrant organizations, including FAIR, NumbersUSA, and CIS.
- Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) — CIS’s publications; designated a hate group by SPLC.
- Immigration History Research Center (University of Minnesota) — Archives and scholarship on immigration history in the United States.
Environmental Justice and Critical Ecology
- EPA Environmental Justice Resources — Federal environmental justice data tools including EJSCREEN.
- Earthjustice — Environmental legal advocacy with a strong environmental justice orientation; useful contrast to Bartlett-adjacent environmentalism.
- Breakthrough Institute — Ecomodernist think tank; publishes research and essays on decoupling economic growth from environmental impact. Represents an alternative to Malthusian limits thinking.
- The Urbanist and Sightline Institute — Pro-housing, pro-transit urban policy perspectives from the Pacific Northwest; representative of the policy orientation the book ultimately endorses.
Digital Humanities and Computational Methods
- The Programming Historian — Peer-reviewed tutorials on digital methods for humanists, including text analysis, network analysis, and GIS.
- NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) — Python library used for text preprocessing in this project.
- Gensim — Python library used for topic modeling (LDA).
- NetworkX — Python library used for citation and organizational network analysis.
- GeoPandas — Python library used for geospatial analysis of Boulder zoning and demographic data.
Journalism and Media
- Boulder Daily Camera Archives — Digitized historical issues of Boulder’s main newspaper; essential primary source for local politics and planning coverage.
- Colorado Sun — Nonprofit news organization covering Colorado politics, housing, and growth.
- CU Boulder News — University news archive including coverage of Bartlett and growth management debates.