In defense of soft, weak Zoomers

Plus the fight to build on Mount Desert Island

My recommended reading this week is Josh Keefe’s Maine Monitor piece about a fight over workforce housing in Mount Desert Island in Maine.

MDI has interesting geography. There’s a ton of coastland, large amounts of the inland area are part of a national park, and there’s just one bridge off the island that tends to get trafficked up, which makes it hard to have large numbers of people commuting from Ellsworth and points north where the land is cheaper. As a result of tourism, remote work, and people buying summer houses — especially the extent to which remote work makes buying a summer house more desirable to a wider swathe of rich people — housing costs are soaring. So, a local nonprofit has proposed building some housing that’s affordable for people who do necessary work on the island.

As is the case everywhere, NIMBYs don’t like that idea.

In this case, the towns on the island are facing skyrocketing costs of providing services, as people doing things like firefighting are demanding large compensating differentials to deal with the annoying commute. As a result, even though property values are soaring, the property tax rate is actually going up.

I think it’s a great example of the dubious economics of trying to generate wealth via housing scarcity. It’s clearly true that scarcity can push up housing values in certain cases. But you’re destroying economic value, and those costs end up arriving somewhere or other.

Other recommendations:

• Aria Babu on two-parent privilege.

• Dylan Matthews on paying kidney donors.

• David Montgomery polls the Roman Empire.

---

Good news this week: Hospitals are now safer than they were before the pandemic, a brief video can change supply skeptics’ minds about housing, the TSMC plant in Arizona seems to be up to Taiwanese standards, shoplifting is going down, we have new gene therapy for sickle cell disease, and drug overdoses are plummeting.

Our comment of the week highlights “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” — a prequel so good I forgot it was a prequel while thinking about prequels:

Testing123: The best prequels are the ones that just tell a story with the characters but don't explicitly try and address plot points from the earlier stories. Think The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. IIRC, the only connection to the later movies in the trilogy is that Eastwood gets his poncho at the end of the movie, but otherwise it's just a story that happens to take place before the others but exists for its own reasons. Same with Temple of Doom (admittedly the weakest of the original trilogy).

Prequels run into thematic and storytelling problems when their whole purpose is to explain some particular aspect of the later in time movies, so you're reverse engineering a reason to tell the story and now have to find a way to make it interesting. Furiosa, which I enjoyed but didn't love, is one of those examples. If it had been a standalone Furiosa story that wasn't checking off boxes of things that were referenced in Fury Road but instead was just telling a unique and unconnected story about a cool character that was introduced to us in Fury Road, it could have been a better and more compelling story. But instead we spent almost the entire run time revisiting sites from Fury Road so that we could understand THAT movie a little bit better. But I already understood Fury road perfectly well when I saw it!

---

Question of the week from theeleaticstranger: Do you think genZ and younger generations are more sensitive to criticism than earlier generations? I’ve heard several stories of people giving what they felt was fair workplace criticism and seeing younger employees take it very hard. To me this seems like a bad trend—people should believe their work is important and that results matter. If people are too afraid to criticize out of fear someone won’t be able to handle it, that seems bad for outcomes. Do you think this is a real trend, and if so is there anything that can be done about it?

I don’t generally like Generations Discourse, but my observation in my particular field of journalism is that, yes, the younger people are accustomed to a gentler style of feedback. My dad, who’s also a writer, has told me the same thing about workshopping scripts. And clearly other people have observed it in other fields, and that’s why the question is being asked. It’s difficult to prove this kind of thing since we don’t have relevant survey data or anything like that, but I do believe it is occurring.

I’d also say that in my experience, we are looking at a longer-running trend.