“The Skateboarding Ethic and the Spirit of Anti-Capitalism.” That was the title of an unusual paper presented at the annual meeting of American economists this year. The title was clearly a reference to a famous 1905 book by German sociologist and economist Max Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. And I really wanted to know what this economist was going to argue, and, even more, who he was.

This year’s economics conference was spread out across hotels around San Francisco’s Union Square. On the first day of the conference, it was raining hard, and I ran from my hotel to another one down the street to see this paper be presented.

Sopping wet, I entered a small, basement conference room before the presentations began. “Is this where the skateboarding paper is being presented?” I asked the room.

Sure enough, a Gen Xer with baggy blue jeans, Vans skate shoes, and a tweed blazer with elbow pads — the only fashion item that screamed “I’m an academic” — stood up and turned around. “Yes, I’m presenting the skateboarding paper here,” he said.

This tweed-jacketed, Vans-wearing man was Thomas Kemp. He’s an economist at The University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. Kemp says he’s been skateboarding for 40 years, and he continues to skate every day he can (it gets harder to skate during Wisconsin’s winters, so Kemp says he snow skates as well).

For a long time, Kemp published pretty standard economic papers. Papers with titles like, “The Impact of Water Clarity on Home Prices in Northwestern Wisconsin” and “Estimation of product price elasticity of demand.”

“When I was a graduate student, I was actually going to write about skateboarding, but I was told ‘that’s not a good idea,'” Kemp says. But Kemp is more established now. In fact, he’s the chair of his economics department, so he’s more willing to ollie onto the topics he’s the most passionate about.

Kemp’s transformation began a few years back, when he discovered the burgeoning academic literature on skateboarding. “I was just blown away, like, ‘Wow, people are doing academic work on skateboarding,'” Kemp says. And that’s when he did his 180 kickflip.

“ I literally dropped everything else I was working on and started writing papers on skateboarding,” Kemp says.

The Value of Skateparks

Kemp has now published a series of economic papers about skateboarding. One paper, recently published in The Journal of Economic Analysis, is titled “Shred Central: Estimating the user benefits associated with large public skateparks.” Kemp estimated the consumer benefits of the Lauridsen Skatepark in Des Moines, Iowa. At 88,000 square feet, it’s the largest skatepark in the United States.

One of the issues with the economics of skateparks is they’re generally free to use, which makes it difficult to figure out how much they’re actually worth. This is a common problem for public goods, like parks, beaches, rec centers, and so on. Determining the value of a skatepark is important to figure out whether, for example, communities should build more skateparks, and how big and tricked-out those skateparks should be. Despite the popularity of the sport — estimates suggest there may be as many as 9 million skateboarders in the US — “public resources devoted to skateboarding lag far beyond other leisure activities such as softball, tennis, or soccer,” Kemp writes.

Kemp argues that the distance skaters (and BMXers, roller bladers, and other recreationists) are willing to travel to go to the skatepark provides a good way to estimate the value of it. Traveling requires time and money, so the distance users are willing to travel provides an indication of how much they think a skatepark is worth.

In “Shred Central,” Kemp surveyed skateboarders at Lauridsen Skatepark, and found they “will travel great distances at significant cost to ride a park of high perceived quality.” Crunching numbers on use of the park and travel distance, Kemp estimates that the user benefits of this skatepark are “$61 per user per day and roughly $488,000 annually.” This high estimate for the value of the skatepark suggests that there’s a shortage of high-quality skateparks around the country and that community leaders should build more of them. Rad!

“The Skateboarding Ethic and the Spirit of Anti-Capitalism”

In his 1905 book, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber argued that Protestant Christianity, especially Calvinism, promoted ethics, like thrift and hard work, that helped nurture the birth of capitalism and rapid economic growth in Northern Europe.

Like Protestants, skateboarders, Kemp argues, have their own set of ethics that can affect their economic lives. And, in Kemp’s view, these ethics can come into conflict with capitalism. For example, skateboarders are known to skate on private property and in front of businesses in search of cool, skateable features. It’s one reason why community leaders have been building skateparks: to encourage skaters to skate in sanctioned areas that are less disruptive to business.

Kemp sees a similar process in history with stickball and baseball. During his presentation, Kemp showed a picture of baseball legend Willie Mays playing stickball in the street when he was young. Like with skateboarding, Kemp says, many leaders saw stickball as a nuisance that disrupted commerce. Kids would shut down streets and disrupt traffic to play the game. They would hit balls and dent cars and break windows. This “irritation to commerce,” Kemp suggests, inspired communities to start building baseball diamonds in community parks and institutionalize the game into more organized and less disruptive baseball leagues.

Willie Mays playing stick ball with Harlem kids.

Bettmann/Getty Images

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Bettmann/Getty Images

“The drive towards creating skateparks appears to me to be on a similar trajectory to what we saw with stickball into baseball,” he says. “That said, we’re now 50-plus years into skateboarding history, and so far, skateboarding seems to be relatively immune from that institutionalization. It’s just as common to see kids skateboarding out in the streets as it is in a skatepark, perhaps even more so.”

Kemp was the last person to present a paper during this particular conference session. The paper presented before him was much less fun, highlighting physical and mental health problems plaguing our society, including the rise of depression, anxiety, and deaths of despair. The author blamed our economic and health systems, which “prioritizes profits over people’s health,” for making these problems worse.

In important ways, skateboarding is a product of capitalism. For decades, for-profit companies have developed and manufactured better skate decks, trucks, and wheels. They’ve marketed the sport. They’ve popularized it. They’ve made it more accessible. Kemp acknowledges that. But he also sees ethics within the culture of skateboarding that can help people overcome the challenges they may face in our capitalist society.

The skateboarding ethic, Kemp says, is “an ethic of resiliency. I fall, I get up, I do it again.” It’s an ethic of “self-betterment. The skateboarder is always trying to do another trick. They’re trying to do the trick better with more style. They’re trying to do it in different places. They’re comparing themselves to their past selves and not necessarily other skateboarders.” And it’s an ethic that isn’t really concerned with competition with others. Skateboarding, he says, is a non-zero sum game. “In other words, if I do the trick, it doesn’t matter that the other skateboarder didn’t do the trick. I’m not in competition with them. I don’t win, they lose, or I lose, they win. No, we’re all winning — hopefully — compared to our previous selves.”

Skateboarding, Kemp suggests, can help us become more resilient. It can help us build more pride in ourselves. It can help us fight isolation and build community. And it can help us exercise, alleviate stress, find joy, and escape the 9-5 grind.

“Skateboarding has something to show us about living life in these challenging times that we find ourselves in,” Kemp says.

Kemp’s presentation, appropriately, took place in San Francisco, which is widely recognized as one of the best and most hardcore skateboarding cities in the world. Skaters here are known to “bomb” hills like daredevils, reaching high speeds and doing incredible tricks. And the city has really come to embrace skateboarding. For example, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art currently has a skateboarding exhibit called “Unity Through Skateboarding” (which, apparently, my son and wife really enjoyed while I was attending this conference).

“San Francisco is legendary,” Kemp said. “Of course, this is a work trip. But, hopefully, I’ll get some skating in while I’m here.”

His job, for more than a decade, has been to steer homeless people into housing.

Last week, social worker Anthony Ruffin lost his home.

On Monday morning, still reeling five days after the Eaton fire destroyed much of Altadena, Ruffin, 56, sipped coffee at a Glendale diner, wiped his eyes, and described the historic Black neighborhood where he has spent much of his life.

“I’d take walks, knock on doors, say ‘hi’ to people’s moms…go to people’s houses and grab a sandwich from their mother,” Ruffin recalled. “ ‘Miss Lee, how you doing? Miss Phillips, can you make me a Seven-Up cake like you used to when I was young? Hi Mr. King.’ Robert, across the street—I’d sit there for hours and talk to him.”

Ruffin grew up in a two-bed, one-bath house on West Palm Street, just above West Altadena Street between Lincoln and Fair Oaks avenues, which he later bought from his parents. As someone who confronts so much suffering on a daily basis as part of his job, Ruffin established a morning ritual in which he’d wake up early and sit in the yard, gaze up at the San Gabriel Mountains, and listen to birds, all the while surrounded by plants he’d named for homeless clients to whom he’d become particularly attached.

“It was my safe place,” he said.

Anthony Ruffin, Sieglinde Von Deffner, and Jeanette Rowe, left to right, talk while people arrive for COVID-19 vaccinations at Leimert Park Plaza.

(Al Seib/Los Angeles Times)

Early on the morning of Jan. 8, Ruffin and his wife Jonni Miller — who is also a longtime social worker serving the homeless community — had to evacuate without time to collect precious possessions.

Handwritten letters, written to Miller by her grandmother on the day she was born, were left behind.

So were the decommissioned cellphones, seven of them, on which Ruffin stored photos of hundreds of clients, along with contact information and notes thanking him for his help.

Hours later, they learned that the home and everything in it was incinerated, along with much of their block and neighborhood.

“It’s terrible,” a tearful Ruffin told me near the hotel where he and Miller are staying as they try to collect themselves.

Ruffin and I met more than a dozen years ago, when he was with a nonprofit called Housing Works Hollywood. He served as case manager for my friend Nathaniel Ayers, the Julliard-trained musician who was homeless in Skid Row and became known as “The Soloist.”

Those of us who know Mr. Ayers have safeguarded some of his possessions, including various musical instruments. Ruffin told me he’s been holding onto a pair of Ayers’ drumsticks for years.

Last week, they were lost in the fire.

At Housing Works, Ruffin’s mentor was Mollie Lowery, a legendary social worker who had also assisted Ayers, and whose motto in helping clients was adopted by Ruffin — “whatever it takes, for as long as it takes.”

In 2017, Times photographer Francine Orr and I profiled Ruffin and his work with the Hollywood 14, a gravely disabled group of homeless people with severe physical and mental illness. His regulars included amputees, diabetics and drug addicts. “Some are partially paralyzed,” I wrote, and “many are ghosts, their former selves barely visible in the shadows of unrelenting psychosis.”

The evening sun shines through the scorched remains of the Altadena Community Church on Jan. 11, 2025.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Ruffin routinely rolled out on weekends and in the middle of the night — as he still does — to check on his clients. He would kneel down on the pavement and look them in the eye, ferry them to appointments, visit them in hospitals, work tirelessly to earn their trust and try to get them into housing.

Ruffin said his desire to become a social worker had a lot to do with his biological father’s struggles and homelessness. Ruffin said he wasn’t close to his father until the last years of his life, when his dad worked in downtown L.A. as a legal briefs courier. They ultimately built a belated but “beautiful relationship,” Ruffin said, telling me his father carried a briefcase that contained a copy of my story about his son the social worker.

In 1976, Ruffin was 8 when he and his mother, Myrtle Williams, moved to the Altadena home that had been purchased in 1972 by his stepfather, Carl Williams, who was a truck driver from Texas who’d found that while certain neighborhoods in Los Angeles were off-limits to Black people, the west side of Altadena was a safe haven.

“We played football in the streets, played baseball in the streets, went to school on the corner,” Ruffin said of his childhood.

The house was often full, he continued, with assorted relatives who needed a place to stay for a little while or maybe longer.

“It was a happy time, because there was a lot of love in that house and people just slept where they slept,” Ruffin said. “If you fell asleep in the living room on the couch, or on the floor, or in the bunk beds…that was where you slept. And there was room under the bunk beds, so someone slept there.”

Ruffin said it was not uncommon for Black men in the neighborhood, when they approached the end of their lives, to insist on taking their last breaths in their own homes. They had known segregation and housing discrimination and struggled to find jobs that paid enough for them to buy property and raise families, Ruffin said, and “they wanted to die in the homes that they built.”

The Eaton fire destroyed this school bus parked outside Altadena’s Aveson Charter School, which burned down on Jan. 11, 2025.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

His mother and stepfather decided instead, upon Carl Williams’ retirement, to move to Hesperia. But still, they wanted to keep the house in the family. So Ruffin bought it from them two decades ago and set out to renovate it, careful not to alter the layout or remodel the house, but to preserve it, as a tribute to all the sweat and love his parents had invested in it.

“I worked two jobs to hold onto that property, because I knew how much it meant to my family,” Ruffin said Monday, pausing as he brushed away tears. “We really fixed the house up and got it looking really decent.”

Ruffin said his mother and stepfather, now 76 and 83, “are devastated” by the destruction. So are all the neighbors whose hearts were crushed as their foothill haven vanished.

“I’ve talked to all of them,” Ruffin said. “Talked to Miss Lee. Talked to Miss Douglas, who can’t stop crying.”

Ruffin and Miller also lost one of their two cats and two chickens. When they fled, they managed to gather up their adopted, one-eyed cat, Maple, (who had once been homeless in South L.A.), and their rescue dog, Nan (a Skid Row stray).

On Jan. 13, with their lives upended and their immediate future uncertain, Miller, who, like her husband, works on Skid Row for the County Department of Health Services, was back at work. Ruffin was taking a day off that was shaping up like many of his other days off.

“I gotta meet up with somebody today who’s homeless and try to help him get into housing,” Ruffin said of a Skid Row client. “I also did that on Friday. I gotta help somebody, every day…I got my own problems, but I’m fortunate. So many of the people down there on Skid Row are dealing with addiction and homelessness and don’t have some of the resources I have. I mean, I got a motel room right now, and they don’t have that.”

Ruffin, like so many others who lost homes in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, was also busy sorting through insurance matters and temporary housing options. He has no idea what insurance will cover or what starting over will cost, so he set up a gofundme page and said he intents to share the proceeds with neighbors.

But he knows exactly what the long-range plan is. He wants to rebuild, to the same dimensions, in the same spot.

“There’s too much history there,” he said. “I want exactly the same thing. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

steve.lopez@latimes.com