+1 for the comment to EJ about being mindful with your political social media posting. The Baileys don’t read a ton of political news but they are on Facebook fairly often, and they are really put off by unnecessary nastiness. How do we all brand the Democrats as a team they want to be associated with?
I think hopeless internet nihilism is actually more damaging than the nastiness.
e.g., LOL CLIMATE DOOM, NOTHING MATTERS--well I'm going to stop you right there, if nothing matters then why would I want to get onboard your political train? I'm going to go watch some football and enjoy my life.
Strongly agree about the damaging effects of hopeless nihilism and excessive doom-and-gloom. It's not just an internet thing - it seems to be mindset that has infected most of the progressive left. I was reading an article the other day about an awesome and exciting new project that my alma mater is launching with some other colleges and universities up and down the Mississippi River to develop a humanities program around the River -- what's cooler than a whole humanities program that comprehensively examines the Mississippi River basin and its relationship to American and world culture??
But in a sad clue as to why the humanities are in free fall, the professors they quoted seemed to be competing to describe it in the most negative terms:
"a place where we can try to respond to the looming social, racial, and environmental catastrophes that are increasingly coming to define the country"
"a responsibility to the communities in which we take up space"
Nonetheless I'm excited about it the project but it makes me sad these people seem so joyless, and I'm not sure I'd want to major in a humanities subject anymore either if they're the ones in charge now.
The real root problem here is that a lot of people do not actually care that much about being politically effective. They may think they do, but they don't. If you could put their brains under a scope, it would show that they care a lot more about feeling good about themselves. That's what the whole "ethic of conviction/ethic of responsibility" distinction is all about.
+1 to your point about the humanities (having studied them back in the day). I think about programs like these as taking the long view, so this posture on the left seems weird to me. How can one be motivated to tackle even the smallest problems, let alone persuade others that they are worth tackling, if nothing matters and we're all doomed?
"...they are really put off by unnecessary nastiness...."
People who want to be politically effective need to avoid more than just outright nastiness, though. Many other kinds of speech on twitter can be alienating and off-putting to potentially persuadable people.
For instance, a reliance on sarcasm and arch humor can mislead readers into believing that you and your side advocate for repellent positions, even when you intend to criticize them. A perpetual deadpanned knowingness will be very entertaining to a minority of insiders who understand that you are doing a bit, but will stigmatize your own causes in the eyes of people who take the tweets at face value.
That's why people who are serious about the ethics of responsibility do not use social media to engage in constant ironic trolling of their opponents.
I think we can agree that our host's behavior is exemplary in this regard.
One thing I try to do when posting about politics on social media is to avoid making absolutist statements and use a lot of qualifiers & other language that emphasizes that the statement I'm making is my subjective impression of the world. This is mainly to avoid getting into arguments, and it's generally been successful. Absolutist statements that present opinions as facts or as evidently true are more likely to get make people defensive and confrontational.
As our resident expert on sarcastic humor, I trust your perspective here! (It’s ok, this is a safe space for sarcasm, conversing with the faithful + Ken in MIA and sfc0101)
Not sure if this is part of your bit but that's not quite true. At a minimum, for any given issue we discuss some small fraction of us are persuadable. Maybe it's small nuclear reactors, maybe it's Beyond Burgers, whatever.
(On bigger issues less clear but maybe - but it's also easier to get used to certain people and 'sarcasm from someone you know is regularly sarcastic' is less of a problem)
From a different angle--I am confident that everyone here is posting in good faith, and if I see a comment that could be interpreted charitably or very uncharitably, I am comfortable defaulting to the former. I don't need to worry so much about sarcasm, in-jokes, and the like.
Bad-faith actors are the bad apples that spoil the entire barrel of discussion.
I definitely think that people should strive to be less nasty online, but having been in spaces that encourage heavy emphasis on what the Baileys think, it gets exhausting.
First of all, I'd say that most people, most of all those typically commenting on world events, don't have a very good sense of what the Baileys think. In my experience, voters and even experienced commentators are really bad at seeing how other voters view things, mostly assuming that their own views are more popular than they really are. You see this with a lot of Matt's reminders on this. Chuck Schumer might be good at it, but as we've seen, it's hard for even him, apparently.
Secondly, the electoral framing of political arguments can certainly be useful, especially as an empathizing message. We do have elections after-all, but it can be really stultifying if you do it for everything. It shuts out not just interesting ideas, but genuine connections and problem-solving with people. it turns political speech into a contest from an exploration of ideas. Now one could say that most political speech on the Internet is already a competition and this would be helpful on the margin, but I imagine that if pre-gauged every comment with a guess for how it would play in Abigail Spanberger's district, we'd lose out on an ability to authentically connect with people. When you go into an argument trying to "beat" your opponent, you'll almost certainly fail.
On yesterday's post, I saw comments shutting down concerns about animal welfare with what the median voter thought. Personally, I thought this pretty short-termist. Sure Cory Booker probably shouldn't play up his veganism to win votes in Iowa, but why restrict ourselves to the next election cycle?
I might have lost track of your main argument, but in general I agree, your life should not revolve around the imaginary Baileys. The specific question from EJ was “what’s the most effective way for me to help particular candidates win elections?” And I think “be mindful that persuadable voters are in your social media audience” is an easy and relevant point. Forever, I had my Facebook settings such that only my very closest friends (who already agreed with me on everything) could see my opinionated posts. (Now I’m just not on FB at all, but that’s me.)
In terms of demand for dense housing. Imagine you’re from suburban Dallas, you went to Michigan and you’ve graduated with a degree in accounting or IT and you’re starting at $70k-$110k. You’re being onboarded remotely. You’re single. You expect to have one kid in 10 years and they will be out of the house by the time you’re 50. Where do you want to live for the next 10 years?
Out in the middle of nowhere? Or a place where there is a ton of things to do after sitting in front of your computer all day?
I get the sense that a lot of internet commenters are introverts so they don’t really grok the need to socialize.
As someone who lives in a "desirable" rural area, it also ignores that remote workers coming from out of state sometimes/often skew local housing prices. You wind up with a town where local wages are low, but remote wages are high, and the housing prices follow the remote wages.
Whereas cities like Philadelphia, Columbus, Houston, or Indianapolis are large enough to absorb the influx, and so long as they don’t have the Bay Area’s perfect storm of terrible urban planning, vast influxes of wealth, and foreign investment, they aren’t going to become unaffordable overnight.
The Bay Area is certainly terrible at density/affordability but the suburbs, for suburbs, are often pretty good. For instance, they don’t have subdivisions/gated communities everywhere and I’ve always been able to live in walking distance of a grocery store.
Actually, Communications Hill in San Jose is a dense neighborhood of townhomes which should be good but does break all those rules - it’s literally up on a hill with no services near it.
It depends on the rural place, but the kinds of rural places that are recent boomtowns tend to be ski resorts, beach resorts, and other places that pride themselves on their scenic-ness, and thus have a lot of building codes and other restrictions that emphasize the preservation of that.
Construction is very local, and I think it's easy to get to a situation where a (possibly temporary?) demand surge leads to much slower growth in supply because local capacity is saturated.
Many factors. Bidding wars for existing houses happen out of sight, often, and set the comps for surrounding neighborhoods. Then the initial asking prices go up and the problem snowballs. There is lots of apartment/4plex/townhouse/condo style rental housing being built, so rent prices are increasing but not faster than inflation, but few single family homes are built. SFHs become rare and more valuable. There's no way for the community to support the amount of construction labor needed to keep up with demand. Even empty or disused lots are worth so much as assets there's no real incentive to develop them. Elected officials are almost universally homeowners, so their wealth increases with housing prices and they have little incentive to try and brake the market. All of these problems tend to exacerbated by out-of-state builder-investors, who develop a property (SFH or multi-family) for rental purposes, which isn't bad in itself, but they're somewhere else, so all that rental income gets sucked out of the local economy. Eventually, all of the people who work locally will rent, their rent checks will go out of state, and all the homeowners will work remotely, and the economic benefits of their work will go to their out of state employer.
There are plenty of smaller cities out there that get coded as "rural" by big city types but can still offer a smaller-scale urban lifestyle and plenty of opportunities to socialize. What they don't have, though, is the kind of cultural amenities you find in big cities.
The most successful small towns/cities for remote working have been in the Mountain West that are located in close proximity to outdoor/nature amenities. But the typical remote worker wouldn't have any incentive to move to, say, Peoria, Illinois.
Part of the problem is that it used to be that the local hub of 8,000 people had three movie theaters, a bowling alley, 15 social/civic organizations, 20 restaurants other than pizza places and fast food, at least one department store, an actual theater, and regular visits from roving cultural amenities like theater tropes, orchestras, and fairs.
Now many places with 40,000 don’t have all or even most of those things.
I had never heard of "earning to give" but I have knocked on a lot of doors and made a lot of calls, and my intuition was always something along the lines of what was stated, i.e., "Are we sure we aren't just annoying people?"
I literally had people tell me on the phone that if we called them again they weren't going to vote at all. There is something that feels a little icky and dystopian to me, though, that in a democracy we should be encouraging people to personally participate less and give money more. I'm not saying it's ineffective, or that working more to donate money to advance a cause you care for isn't *also* activism, but...I don't know.
If some enthusiastic high schooler came to me all bright-eyed and wanted to know how to best make a difference, I would feel a little gross being like, "Get a part-time job and start chucking that money at [organization X], kid."
I get that it seems less idealist but… would it actually be good if we lived in a world where voters were so fickle they would change their mind about who to voter for or whether they vote based on some stranger talking to them at their door? The idea that “organizing” is, or should be, what decides elections strikes me as odd.
That said, there are other ways an idealistic person can get involved. They can participate in public meetings at the state and local level, they can run for local office or serve on a citizen board or commission, they can mobilize their friends and family to vote, etc.
I hear what you are saying and I feel bad that my reaction to that answer was relief that I could stop feeling like I have to door knock or phone bank which I really hate doing for obvious reasons. But as for young people I think that really local races really need volunteers to mount any kind of campaign because money is scarcer and the one kind of door knocking that seems effective anecdotally is when the candidate is the one knocking on doors and talking to voters. So I guess I would suggest to young people that they volunteer at that level if they want to be part of making electoral change.
I knocked doors for a city council campaign in the fall. Most people don't answer and 90% of the ones that do basically don't want to talk and want you to leave as soon as possible. On the flip side, every time someone knocked on my door for some campaign-related event, I got a little irritated that they were disturbing me in my own home. So I understand why it might be a turn-off for a lot of people. That said, the mayor happened to knock on my door which was pretty cool and did make me rank her higher when I got my ballot.
That last bit: my mother won office in a small town, late in life. I was already familiar with the town, went back there to help her when I had time. Met people who would say that they voted for Candidate X because they came to see them. This was mostly a thing among people who were middle aged or older.
This is why it would be great if every community in America had a main street or a town square, and residents went there to walk around and interact with their communities. That way, politicians could just hang out there and interested voters could initiate conversations with the politicians instead of having strangers bug them at home.
The local area can really make a difference. The main reason I never voted in midterms until my 30s was I wasn't even aware they were going on. I don't even follow politics now, let alone then. There's a chance a phone call may have actually clued me in on an midterm.
But in terms of national politics phone calls were as annoying then as they are now. I'm not going to change my mind because of a random text or call from a stranger! Especially in the last election, where they made it sound like it was life or death. If I already agree with that premise shouldn't they think I'd already be voting?
Isn't the idea mobilization? Ie. call those who you know would vote for you, and simply remind them to vote and than them for voting, because it's important.
But I'd guess TV ads and citylights and jumbotrons (big fucking posters) might help mobilize those who have absolutely no clue about the existence of elections.
For the last couple of cycles, I've been serving as an election official and personally doing my best to make the voting process as quick, seamless, and pleasant as possible. It's been extremely rewarding in a scratch-that-itch kind of way. Then I can throw bags of money at super PACs on the side.
I totally agree with this. I served as an election official in 2020 and found it immensely rewarding for exactly that reason. My experience as a voter with a weird last name was that the process could occasionally be less seamless than it needed to be for reasons more related to the age and technological inexperience (and less the process itself) of the average poll worker, and my experience bore that out. Even at 37, I probably brought the average down by several decades.
Definitely agree with this feeling. Also - what are campaigns going to do with the money? I think the evidence for what campaigns do with money is generally based on some pretty weak evidence. Especially past a certain threshold of money. After that, you're probably just throwing the money away.
This is one reason why I think campaign finance reform ended up causing terrible things. If people could give directly to the party, and the party doled it out so that each candidate got a certain amount, I think it would be wildly more effective - and would make the parties matter again.
Mr. Pinboard Ceglowski shamed some of the tech community into donating to small campaigns across the US (the “Great Slate”) and while the campaigns were very happy about it, it appears that none of it actually helped. Local reachouts don’t matter when voters get all their partisan opinions from TV.
That "certain threshold" definitely is becoming an issue. Earning to give to Beto O'Rourke or Amy McGrath is certainly less effective than calling up a random local official in your neighborhood and volunteering for them.
I think if you took a group of random people and asked them to rethink land use they would end up with the same or more restrictive zoning. I understand the current process is frustrating but I think experts and most elected officials are ahead of most random residents on this who haven’t thought about the issue before, and the political dynamic of how people have an incentive to try to push development elsewhere is still real but held in check by activism and lobbying to some extent. Of course you and others have successfully educated many people but is it most? I’m not so sure.
Counterpoint, of perhaps adding a little texture to this - If you put professionals and a small representative slice of residents into a process for this, *and gave them a specific framework to work towards* you can get a pretty good output. Additionally, in these things, the group/committee/whatever should never be the final voice.
Source - served on a bunch of these, and where it was most valuable was being able to fill in the gaps of the professionals in, say, the land use office of the local gov't. Example - Virginia DOT said "We should see if Rt. 1 in Fairfax can improved into something that moves cars, bikes, pedestrians and mass transit better." A medium sized group was put together w/ VDOT to work that(I served on it). VDOT handed the plan to Fairfax, and said "Figure out some of the mid-level stuff." County put together a group of citizen leadership and county planning and transportation staff. Put together a mid-level framework for things but, and this is crucial, elected officials didn't just rubber stamp things. They took our work, did a little nip and tuck, approved it, and are using that as the guide for the next steps.
The key was to have citizens who had already shown interest in this type of work and brought some form educated perspective to it. Not just the weird old guy who shows up to random meetings to yell about how everything got worse when the Metro opened and Those People started showing up(actual thing that happened at a community meeting I chaired).
"The key was to have citizens who had already shown interest in this type of work and brought some form educated perspective to it. "
How do you differentiate "already shown interest in this type of work" from "busybodies who show up and NIMBY everything"? I mean, part of the problem with many things is the sort of "diffuse benefits specific harms" framework - and the people who show the most interest are the small-but-vocal "specific harms" group.
In your example, how was the "representative slice of residents" picked?
This is going to open the question of if we're just stacking the jury, so to speak, but in this case, various high level stakeholders picked those people. So, the two electeds picked a couple people, a pro-business organization got a seat, each of the major civic groups got a spot. With a group of about 20 or so, any particular crank was going to be counterbalanced.
I've made this argument before, but it is worth repeating. If anyone cares about this stuff, you need to actually get in the game and really think of how to be productive. I ended up on these groups because 1) I'm weird and I enjoy the work 2) I wasn't a crank 3) I could be counted on by those higher up on the food chain to not make myself or others look like fools and 4) I translate technical language into the common tongue. Land use is a very specific language, and you can't make a compelling argument to a wide audience if they can't access your lingo.
At the end of the day, people are going to be people, and there's just no way to remove that. I love the idea of a strong civil service, and I adored the professional staff I worked with. But they had no idea how to communicate in terms normies could understand. I work in IT during the day and it drives me insane when techies talk techie to a non-technical audience.
TL:DR - you need good people controlling the input to the process, or it's just another tool for garbage in/garbage out.
I totally agree that groups of involved residents can often be helpful in a process like the Route 1 in Fairfax one, both to improve the plan and also create community support for the eventual plan. I wasn't referring to that kind of thing, which as you note, was about bringing in people who are already interested in and/or expert in transportation and/or were influential stakeholders.
The "citizen assembly" type idea is about having randomly selected groups of residents make decisions, explicitly arguing that's better than currently powerful and/or expert ones. I don't agree in general and definitely not around urbanist policy subject matter.
There was a Vox article about this idea (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22878118/jury-duty-citizens-assembly-lottocracy-open-democracy) which was much more positive toward it than I would be. And in response to some of the counterarguments, the proponent says that the assemblies should just come up with ideas and then they should be put to a public vote, like a ballot initiative. Which, I think, is even worse because ballot initiatives are subject to most voters not knowing even the smallest amount about an issue and being swayed by ignorance and/or misleading TV ads or something.
"explicitly arguing that's better than currently powerful and/or expert ones"
This isn't what citizens' assemblies are arguing. They argue that they're a better way of hearing from experts because of the incentives motivating the participants i.e., they're there to solve a problem in a way they can all agree on rather than making decisions based on the next election outcome.
These assemblies give people the opportunity and incentives to learn about the problem they're given. They hear from and get to ask questions of experts before making their recommendations. They don't need to be policy matter experts themselves, and it's usually better that they aren't because they're able to arrive at a challenge from many different angles and find a compromise.
Oh, man, yeah, hard nope. My first reaction to that is that it is ripe for coming up with ideas that are actually illegal to pursue for a variety of reasons. And governance by ballot initiative should be launched into the sun. Take care!
I think you're imagining taking a group of random people and giving them one afternoon to rethink land use. But if you took a group of random people and told them, "for the next six months you're on the land use committee instead of doing your old job - learn about land use and think about these issues, and we will pay your salary", you'd probably get something much better. Neighborhood meetings and ballot measures get people's snap judgments, but a committee like this that got the *informed* judgments of a wide swath of people would likely result in something better.
But is that really a problem? If a city fully understands the consequences? In our current situation private property (especially land) is sacred, self-determination of communities is also very much protected, there's no equal opportunity or anything like that for having "good land", so current landowners of a city can do this.
Instead of infighting YIMBYs should move to one place (and then NIMBYs will move away from that place).
Anyone else have their own YIMBY red pill moments they want to share, now that Matt shared his?
Mine was about 15 years ago when a cool looking midrise condo building was being proposed right next to multiple buildings of similar height (thinking the proposed building was in the 8-10 story range) on the same side of a busy street. But oh boy, the neighborhood association on the opposite side of this busy street, a neighborhood that I spent my childhood living next to and spent plenty of time in, they completely lost their shit. They did stunts like tie balloons to a really long string to try to demonstrate the alleged horrors of the height of this building. When I talked to them in their community building effort, their reasoning for opposition was basically "if you approve this building, they'll approve many more like it in our neighborhood in the future!" And when I attended the P&Z meeting over this, that's when I got the full experience of hearing dumb NIMBY comments from people that had the privilege to raise hell in such meetings in person.
The project got reduced to 4 stories, which as far as outcomes go could have been far worse, but it sent me down the path of no return in this regard.
I was a reporter at a small newspaper in Georgia a few years ago, and one of the towns I covered was just a suburban nothing place: all single entrance subdivisions and strip malls. For years, the people wanted to develop a downtown and would bitch about how there was nothing to do there. Then a developer came forward with a plan to basically build a downtown from scratch, with over 90,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space and 800 apartments. Of course, everyone lost their shit over the apartments part.
A Facebook group against the development got 2,000 members in a few weeks and was flooded with comments like "But what happens when it all goes Section 8?" and "We don't want those kind of people living here." One of the town's kindest people, a lady who organized the Special Olympics every year with money out of her own pocket, pulled me aside after a council meeting and said "If Trump doesn't build his wall, and this thing does get built, this whole town will be full of criminals in a couple of years."
The whole plan fell apart a couple months later, even though the developer was revising down his plans to include fewer apartments. I don't think anyone is ever going to try to build anything except subdivisions and strip malls in that town. And if the people that live there want to have a night out or go shopping, they're always going to go somewhere else.
Ah, the exurbs. They try to have the "best of both worlds" by being both somewhat rural and somewhat urban, but end up being the worst of both worlds instead.
I remember reading about the New York Islanders' attempt to build a new arena for themselves as part of a larger real estate development that would include housing, retail, office space, the works. This was maybe 15 years ago. The team's owner was going to fund all of it with his own money (not the norm for new sports facilities) and it was going to be located on the site of (I believe) an old racetrack that was next to a highway and wasn't being used for anything else. The local politicians sat on the proposal until it died on the vine, saying how concerned they were about how it would tarnish the suburban character of Nassau County. The team ended up moving to Brooklyn.
I'm not an Islanders fan or even much of a hockey fan, but I do generally like sports arenas so I followed the story with some interest and I remember thinking how absurd the whole thing was. Long Island has been decaying for a long time and here you had someone offering to build something cool there, with his own money, for the first time in forever, and the answer was "no thanks"? One of the first times I really realized how irrationally averse Americans are to any development other than McMansions, big box stores, and surface parking.
Mine was as an intern at the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority when they were in the planning stages for an underground garage at the Library Lot. The idea was to put a large mixed use building above the garage since its in the middle of downtown. I was surprised how much "concerns" about character and parking drove the politics the DDA faced, and that housing was seen by so many as only a source of negative externalities. Over a decade later, the garage is there with nothing above it.
I moved to Silicon Valley for my well-paying tech job and was surprised to find there was nothing here and I couldn’t afford SF. Eventually from that I found Sonja and SFBARF (the founders of YIMBY) who had started just going to every city council meeting and speaking in favor of all infill development.
I'm shocked no one mentioned the truly shocking thing in that chart on the homeless...the homeless population went down almost 10% over the last 13 years! I trust the data comes from a reliable source, so maybe it's only my personal history of living in LA that makes that data so head-spinning.
I take MY's point that if drug addiction is increasing, the homeless data trend runs the opposite way. But it also runs counter to the trends in house prices and affordability! I don't doubt MY's main premise, that homeless is mostly about housing, but it's strange that this chart doesn't seem to support that connection. And since homelessness and housing affordability are not really correlating, you can hardly point out the same lack of correlation with drug abuse and say "see it can't be that!". At least not if you believe it's about affordability.
But also - I question the premise of Tim Lee's particularly question. I don't think we do know that drug addiction, is rising recently. It seems clear that prescription drug addictions and misuse rose through the early 2000s. But the rise of overdose over the last 10 years seems more about stronger opioids, a la fentanyl, than about the size of the addicted population. There's sadly a lack of reliable data on number of drug addicts, but the best I can find shows overall drug use as flat over the last ten years or so:
To clarify on fentanyl - it's not really a separate thing people get addicted to. Generally it's added to other opioids, and sometimes to other drugs like cocaine, to strengthen the dose. Imagine you're a dealer with a kg of heroin. Add a little fentanyl and suddenly you can sell 5 or 10 times the "high" with the same amount of product.
At the risk of rambling - I also don't know that fentanyl is associated with mental problems beyond addiction. My understanding is drugs like coke and meth are more likely to trigger violence or mental health disorders. The main "mental" problem with opioids is they are very addicting and that seems to push many people into lying, stealing, other forms of petty crime or other plain stupid things to feed their expensive habit.
I think Wigan's claim is that although opioid *deaths* have been rising, that doesn't tell us that opioid *use* has been - it's compatible with at least the quick summary of the data that opioid use has been constant, while strength of available opioids has grown.
Re: homelessness, I look forward to reading the results of your research into the various causes at work. An additional dimension might be recent changes in how governments/social workers/etc. address homelessness. To the extent those changes do or do not succeed at improving people's lives, they impact homelessness rates over time, too.
For example, Michael Shellenberger has been on the podcasting circuit lately, and he attributes SF's homelessness problem primarily to addiction and mental illness. He has an interesting take about how the incorporation of "victim ideology" (for lack of a better term, on my part) among social workers and other relevant institutions has led to ineffective and counterproductive services for homeless people. On his account, the new changes assume it's immoral to make people with addiction issues at least partly responsible for improving their own situation and to make certain social services contingent on concrete efforts to recover. (It's possible I'm misremembering his specific beliefs/arguments.)
I'm inclined to think something like his account is at least partly true for places like SF, but it'd be interesting to look at when specific changes were made and how that timeline fits with the data cited in this post. (Shellenberger might address this exact question in his new book, which I haven't read.) If you start to see big changes in approach in big cities around 2014, say, then that could be one factor contributing to the rise in unsheltered / chronically homeless since then.
What makes you think someone who is so addicted to a substance that they end up living on the street has any ability to quit? It makes no sense to me.
What I think is advocates have a real issue with someone losing or not having agency. They think if someone decides to stop taking their anti-psychotics or go back to heroin they are making a conscious valid choice. They fundamentally oppose the idea that those decisions are being made by a fundamentally broken brain.
I am a materialist and I am sympathetic to the view that none of us ultimately control are behavior. Certainly, none of us choose our thoughts, or in the case of drug addicts, our compulsions. However, this belief when extended too far, becoming a strong external locus of self control, may be the very thing that's leading people to giving in to their addictions. We know that people who believe in their own self efficacy (i.e. have a strong *internal* locus of self control) are more likely to quit smoking, exercise, and perform well academically. If that's true, (and the correlation doesn't run in the opposite direction) it may be better for us to believe a small lie in the pursuit of a better life. Our beliefs are embedded in the physical systems of our brains as much as an addiction is.
That's very valid if you're talking about someone who got called into their bosses office to discussion performance that's been impacted by their alcoholism. They have a wife and kids and a house and car payment and they say, "I really need to get my s_hit together." But when someone has fallen so far that they've passed out and pi_sed and s_hit themselves in a doorway and are yellow with jaundice - that's a whole different thing.
At least to maintain hope, I guess I have to assume that people with serious addiction problems can eventually quit one way or another. Then the question becomes what's most effective at getting them there. I certainly agree that addiction is a disease of the brain and strongly affects decision-making -- we can't treat the decision to use as a fully conscious or autonomous one. At the same time, I don't think we can assume that people will recover on their own, and it's at least plausible that strong incentives (e.g., "if you want to stay in shelter, you have to test clean this week") are one way to help them improve. But I'm not at all an expert and can be persuaded based on evidence from the field.
I think we need to entertain the idea that, for many of those who have fallen so far that they've ended up on the street, they can't stay clean outside a secure facility.
It's like with any drug. You take 1000 18 year olds and give them a few beers. At one end a couple of them will just not like it - at all. And then you get into the middle and some kids will say, "This is kinda fun." And then as you get to the other end some will say, "This is REALLY fun!!" And then there are a handful that will say, "This is the greatest thing ever, this answers everything, this completes me!"
When you get into the 998th or 999th or 1000th kid you may have someone who has such a powerful reaction to alcohol that they will die from it. They may be so addicted they can't function in society and can't quit under any circumstances outside a secure facility.
I used alcohol because most people have experience with it. People also don't realize that it's just as powerful a drug as any other. People think that if I gave you some heroin you'd instantly become addictted. But the range of responses is similar to alcohol - at one extreme you'd get a headache and feel like crap and have no interest in ever trying it again.
I agree. The fact is, as a society, we are abandoning what I would consider critically ill people to the streets. I consider them critical because they cannot survive without chasing the next high. If left without their drugs and/or alcohol they will decompensate, seize, etc. For the IV drug addicted, they have no serotonin. They are in intractable pain without their drug. Additionally, it is highly likely they have endocarditis. So, to be humane, these individuals should be admitted to secure health facilities where they can safely be dried out/sobered, treated, and sheltered until such time they can be functional people again, clean and sober, possibly returning to their communities via group homes, structured support etc. Otherwise they will die. Many of the addicted have underlying mental health illness and that should be identified and addressed. At this time it is almost impossible to compel an addicted (brain broken) or mentally ill adult (over 18) family member to residential treatment and it is crushingly expensive.
One part of the country, New England, already has the sort of citizen-engaged democracy Kyle asks about in its town meeting form of government. (Towns, legally defined, have twice-a-year meetings in which any registered voter can vote and be heard on major questions facing the town.) The system has much to recommend it (if you’re patient and have a high tolerance for tedium, but maybe all government demands that). But I’m not sure it yields less caution than other forms; if anything, status quo bias seems greater (since older people and long-time residents disproportionately participate). Whether town meetings work and could be exported to the rest of the country might be an interesting topic for a future post.
"...the classic Unseld/Hayes frontcourt from the 1970s...."
Oh my god. How do you know about these guys? They retired before you were born. I'm amazed that people still talk about them.
But, yeah -- it was an awesome collaboration. Wes had the worst knees and the biggest heart in the business. He could block out guys a foot taller, and throw a rebound from under the defensive boards down to his guard at the other basket, easy as looking. Hayes was erratic, sometimes cold, but a solid scorer when he was on. They were both working-class heroes, not prima donnas.
I haven't thought about them in over forty years. Again, I'm amazed that they are remembered.
Citizens' assembly sounds cool except people will try to escape it like jury duty. California did put a lot of effort into making its redistricting commission representative of the population but there were many challenges.
It’s worse than that though. At least with a trial your presentation of evidence is live, oral, and in-person, plus juries are relatively small, so people feel pressure to at least try to pay attention and understand WTF is going on. Also, most of the kinds of cases that go to jury trial (criminal, personal injury, malpractice, etc.) have some kind of at least moderately interesting narrative to latch onto (even if it’s just the drama of the trial itself). But to get the kind of knowledge needed to make citizens' assemblies work, I don’t know if enough people would bother with the reading, and I’ve seen/been in enough college lectures to know that once class size gets above 20-30 people start to feel they can get away with snoozing.
Yeah my concern is that, plus they'll treat the reading/information like they’re in school and it’s homework. Only a few energized people/teacher’s pets will actually do the reading/viewing/whatever, and only a few of those will actually understand it.
The key to making them appealing is to juice up the incentives. Legal juries have lots of issues and there is plenty of criticism and suggestion in the literature.
Some incentives include, paying people plenty of money so they're able to take the appropriate leave or childcare arrangements, give the process authority so people know their time is not going to be wasted, make the time commitment clear from the beginning so people can plan their lives around it.
I think it's important with these innovative approaches to democratic decision making to not have a "cheems mindset" and instead think of the way you could address the possible problems with a proposal.
I mean, sure, and I actually agree with a lot of the proposals around (judicial) juries for like childcare and juror pay. But fundamentally, the problem with policy juries is that most people just aren't that interested in policy, and (unlike a trial or grand-jury indictment) policymaking doesn't lend itself to the kind of narrative/story framework that people who just aren't that interested in policy can latch onto to make themselves interested. It'll just be homework, and (unless you--like me!--were a teacher's pet through 20+ years of schooling) nobody likes homework. The problem is psychological and attitudinal, and there are no good policy solutions to that kind of problem. That's the root of my skepticism of sortition in the policymaking space. (Again, I *don't* have this skepticism when it comes to the judicial system, because the dispute-resolution function of the judiciary necessarily adds the element of narrative and--to be frank--drama that laypeople can get themselves invested in so it feels more like watching a movie than it does homework.)
+1 on Twitter being a great source of information. I'll even up the temperature on the take and say that I can also find the arguments informative at times, even if they can be tedious. The key is to limit your follows to arguers that you trust can be good at informing you through argument. (Matt of course is one of those follows for me.)
The other thing I'd say about Twitter is that it's best not to participate unless you have some really unique information to share. I registered for a Twitter account just a year or two after it got popular, but I never actually tweeted anything for years until I found a niche of information (that has nothing to do with subject material that would be familiar here at Slow Boring) that had yet to be filled, and once I did that I found a purpose to actually participate. People who use Twitter like any other social media site are the ones that for me are not worth following.
Long-time admirer, recent paid subscriber. The search function produced inconclusive results, so must ask: where are you at on “revenue-neutral tax reform to achieve progressive taxation on all income, regardless of source?” My financial-planner brother thinks that (if we include such arcana as eliminating the Step-up in Cost Basis) we could raise so much more from the capital-rich class that overall brackets would fall for pretty much anyone actually *earning* (payroll/bonus etc) income. Revenue neutrality, I’d like to hope, de-fangs or at least forstalls the fight over the proper size or scope of government. Thoughts?
The section that begins "Suppose that door-knocking" and ends "just as you would if you were knocking on strangers’ doors." was wonderful and could potentially be very impactful.
I'd humbly suggest Matt or others find a way to spread it on Twitter or FB. Maybe even as a pinned tweet (if that's what they're called).
I think the clearest answer to “how much demand is there for dense housing?” comes from places like Manhattan, where 1.5 million people live on the island and rents are still high because the demand outstrips the supply. It’s certainly not what everyone wants, but more people want it than can actually have it right now.
Interesting my experience with aphantasia seems to be slightly different in that I can't really recreate music in my head like that. I'm curious have you never had visual images come to your head? On rare occasion I can sort of briefly visualize a memory/photo though not on command and I'm certain I dream visually.
+1 for the comment to EJ about being mindful with your political social media posting. The Baileys don’t read a ton of political news but they are on Facebook fairly often, and they are really put off by unnecessary nastiness. How do we all brand the Democrats as a team they want to be associated with?
I think hopeless internet nihilism is actually more damaging than the nastiness.
e.g., LOL CLIMATE DOOM, NOTHING MATTERS--well I'm going to stop you right there, if nothing matters then why would I want to get onboard your political train? I'm going to go watch some football and enjoy my life.
Strongly agree about the damaging effects of hopeless nihilism and excessive doom-and-gloom. It's not just an internet thing - it seems to be mindset that has infected most of the progressive left. I was reading an article the other day about an awesome and exciting new project that my alma mater is launching with some other colleges and universities up and down the Mississippi River to develop a humanities program around the River -- what's cooler than a whole humanities program that comprehensively examines the Mississippi River basin and its relationship to American and world culture??
But in a sad clue as to why the humanities are in free fall, the professors they quoted seemed to be competing to describe it in the most negative terms:
"a place where we can try to respond to the looming social, racial, and environmental catastrophes that are increasingly coming to define the country"
"a responsibility to the communities in which we take up space"
Nonetheless I'm excited about it the project but it makes me sad these people seem so joyless, and I'm not sure I'd want to major in a humanities subject anymore either if they're the ones in charge now.
https://www.macalester.edu/news/2022/01/project-to-develop-humanities-curriculum-around-mississippi-river-receives-grant-from-mellon-foundation/
The real root problem here is that a lot of people do not actually care that much about being politically effective. They may think they do, but they don't. If you could put their brains under a scope, it would show that they care a lot more about feeling good about themselves. That's what the whole "ethic of conviction/ethic of responsibility" distinction is all about.
I think you have to qualify "feeling good about themselves" - in many cases it's really about feeling *bad* about themselves or something else.
I live in a country that, on the whole, has probably never been so tolerant and accepting. Their alternate universe sounds unpleasant.
So interesting - thanks for posting about it!
+1 to your point about the humanities (having studied them back in the day). I think about programs like these as taking the long view, so this posture on the left seems weird to me. How can one be motivated to tackle even the smallest problems, let alone persuade others that they are worth tackling, if nothing matters and we're all doomed?
Seriously- it’s like we need some Audacity to Hope
"...they are really put off by unnecessary nastiness...."
People who want to be politically effective need to avoid more than just outright nastiness, though. Many other kinds of speech on twitter can be alienating and off-putting to potentially persuadable people.
For instance, a reliance on sarcasm and arch humor can mislead readers into believing that you and your side advocate for repellent positions, even when you intend to criticize them. A perpetual deadpanned knowingness will be very entertaining to a minority of insiders who understand that you are doing a bit, but will stigmatize your own causes in the eyes of people who take the tweets at face value.
That's why people who are serious about the ethics of responsibility do not use social media to engage in constant ironic trolling of their opponents.
I think we can agree that our host's behavior is exemplary in this regard.
One thing I try to do when posting about politics on social media is to avoid making absolutist statements and use a lot of qualifiers & other language that emphasizes that the statement I'm making is my subjective impression of the world. This is mainly to avoid getting into arguments, and it's generally been successful. Absolutist statements that present opinions as facts or as evidently true are more likely to get make people defensive and confrontational.
That is absolutely a great observation. Or at least, I think it's something I could learn from, personally.
100%, no question.
As our resident expert on sarcastic humor, I trust your perspective here! (It’s ok, this is a safe space for sarcasm, conversing with the faithful + Ken in MIA and sfc0101)
Right, this is a safe space in that it's not public-facing and there's no one persuadable here. Slowboring is, if anything, antisocial media.
"there's no one persuadable here"
Not sure if this is part of your bit but that's not quite true. At a minimum, for any given issue we discuss some small fraction of us are persuadable. Maybe it's small nuclear reactors, maybe it's Beyond Burgers, whatever.
(On bigger issues less clear but maybe - but it's also easier to get used to certain people and 'sarcasm from someone you know is regularly sarcastic' is less of a problem)
"...but that's not quite true..."
Okay, you've persuaded me: there are persuadable people here.
From a different angle--I am confident that everyone here is posting in good faith, and if I see a comment that could be interpreted charitably or very uncharitably, I am comfortable defaulting to the former. I don't need to worry so much about sarcasm, in-jokes, and the like.
Bad-faith actors are the bad apples that spoil the entire barrel of discussion.
I definitely think that people should strive to be less nasty online, but having been in spaces that encourage heavy emphasis on what the Baileys think, it gets exhausting.
First of all, I'd say that most people, most of all those typically commenting on world events, don't have a very good sense of what the Baileys think. In my experience, voters and even experienced commentators are really bad at seeing how other voters view things, mostly assuming that their own views are more popular than they really are. You see this with a lot of Matt's reminders on this. Chuck Schumer might be good at it, but as we've seen, it's hard for even him, apparently.
Secondly, the electoral framing of political arguments can certainly be useful, especially as an empathizing message. We do have elections after-all, but it can be really stultifying if you do it for everything. It shuts out not just interesting ideas, but genuine connections and problem-solving with people. it turns political speech into a contest from an exploration of ideas. Now one could say that most political speech on the Internet is already a competition and this would be helpful on the margin, but I imagine that if pre-gauged every comment with a guess for how it would play in Abigail Spanberger's district, we'd lose out on an ability to authentically connect with people. When you go into an argument trying to "beat" your opponent, you'll almost certainly fail.
On yesterday's post, I saw comments shutting down concerns about animal welfare with what the median voter thought. Personally, I thought this pretty short-termist. Sure Cory Booker probably shouldn't play up his veganism to win votes in Iowa, but why restrict ourselves to the next election cycle?
I might have lost track of your main argument, but in general I agree, your life should not revolve around the imaginary Baileys. The specific question from EJ was “what’s the most effective way for me to help particular candidates win elections?” And I think “be mindful that persuadable voters are in your social media audience” is an easy and relevant point. Forever, I had my Facebook settings such that only my very closest friends (who already agreed with me on everything) could see my opinionated posts. (Now I’m just not on FB at all, but that’s me.)
In terms of demand for dense housing. Imagine you’re from suburban Dallas, you went to Michigan and you’ve graduated with a degree in accounting or IT and you’re starting at $70k-$110k. You’re being onboarded remotely. You’re single. You expect to have one kid in 10 years and they will be out of the house by the time you’re 50. Where do you want to live for the next 10 years?
Out in the middle of nowhere? Or a place where there is a ton of things to do after sitting in front of your computer all day?
I get the sense that a lot of internet commenters are introverts so they don’t really grok the need to socialize.
I heard a million comments to the effect of "the pandemic and remote work will breathe life back into rural areas".
As it turns out, people live in cities and suburbs because they want to, not just because that's where the work is.
All the rise of remote work has done is allowed the folks with the most purchasing power to more freely choose *which* city or suburb.
As someone who lives in a "desirable" rural area, it also ignores that remote workers coming from out of state sometimes/often skew local housing prices. You wind up with a town where local wages are low, but remote wages are high, and the housing prices follow the remote wages.
Whereas cities like Philadelphia, Columbus, Houston, or Indianapolis are large enough to absorb the influx, and so long as they don’t have the Bay Area’s perfect storm of terrible urban planning, vast influxes of wealth, and foreign investment, they aren’t going to become unaffordable overnight.
The Bay Area is certainly terrible at density/affordability but the suburbs, for suburbs, are often pretty good. For instance, they don’t have subdivisions/gated communities everywhere and I’ve always been able to live in walking distance of a grocery store.
Actually, Communications Hill in San Jose is a dense neighborhood of townhomes which should be good but does break all those rules - it’s literally up on a hill with no services near it.
This is the part I really don't get. In such a rural area, is the zoning still so bad that housing can't keep up? Or are there other factors?
It depends on the rural place, but the kinds of rural places that are recent boomtowns tend to be ski resorts, beach resorts, and other places that pride themselves on their scenic-ness, and thus have a lot of building codes and other restrictions that emphasize the preservation of that.
Construction is very local, and I think it's easy to get to a situation where a (possibly temporary?) demand surge leads to much slower growth in supply because local capacity is saturated.
Many factors. Bidding wars for existing houses happen out of sight, often, and set the comps for surrounding neighborhoods. Then the initial asking prices go up and the problem snowballs. There is lots of apartment/4plex/townhouse/condo style rental housing being built, so rent prices are increasing but not faster than inflation, but few single family homes are built. SFHs become rare and more valuable. There's no way for the community to support the amount of construction labor needed to keep up with demand. Even empty or disused lots are worth so much as assets there's no real incentive to develop them. Elected officials are almost universally homeowners, so their wealth increases with housing prices and they have little incentive to try and brake the market. All of these problems tend to exacerbated by out-of-state builder-investors, who develop a property (SFH or multi-family) for rental purposes, which isn't bad in itself, but they're somewhere else, so all that rental income gets sucked out of the local economy. Eventually, all of the people who work locally will rent, their rent checks will go out of state, and all the homeowners will work remotely, and the economic benefits of their work will go to their out of state employer.
There are plenty of smaller cities out there that get coded as "rural" by big city types but can still offer a smaller-scale urban lifestyle and plenty of opportunities to socialize. What they don't have, though, is the kind of cultural amenities you find in big cities.
The most successful small towns/cities for remote working have been in the Mountain West that are located in close proximity to outdoor/nature amenities. But the typical remote worker wouldn't have any incentive to move to, say, Peoria, Illinois.
Part of the problem is that it used to be that the local hub of 8,000 people had three movie theaters, a bowling alley, 15 social/civic organizations, 20 restaurants other than pizza places and fast food, at least one department store, an actual theater, and regular visits from roving cultural amenities like theater tropes, orchestras, and fairs.
Now many places with 40,000 don’t have all or even most of those things.
"I get the sense that a lot of internet commenters are introverts so they don’t really grok the need to socialize."
The past 2 years have really, really confirmed this in my mind.
I had never heard of "earning to give" but I have knocked on a lot of doors and made a lot of calls, and my intuition was always something along the lines of what was stated, i.e., "Are we sure we aren't just annoying people?"
I literally had people tell me on the phone that if we called them again they weren't going to vote at all. There is something that feels a little icky and dystopian to me, though, that in a democracy we should be encouraging people to personally participate less and give money more. I'm not saying it's ineffective, or that working more to donate money to advance a cause you care for isn't *also* activism, but...I don't know.
If some enthusiastic high schooler came to me all bright-eyed and wanted to know how to best make a difference, I would feel a little gross being like, "Get a part-time job and start chucking that money at [organization X], kid."
I get that it seems less idealist but… would it actually be good if we lived in a world where voters were so fickle they would change their mind about who to voter for or whether they vote based on some stranger talking to them at their door? The idea that “organizing” is, or should be, what decides elections strikes me as odd.
That said, there are other ways an idealistic person can get involved. They can participate in public meetings at the state and local level, they can run for local office or serve on a citizen board or commission, they can mobilize their friends and family to vote, etc.
I hear what you are saying and I feel bad that my reaction to that answer was relief that I could stop feeling like I have to door knock or phone bank which I really hate doing for obvious reasons. But as for young people I think that really local races really need volunteers to mount any kind of campaign because money is scarcer and the one kind of door knocking that seems effective anecdotally is when the candidate is the one knocking on doors and talking to voters. So I guess I would suggest to young people that they volunteer at that level if they want to be part of making electoral change.
I knocked doors for a city council campaign in the fall. Most people don't answer and 90% of the ones that do basically don't want to talk and want you to leave as soon as possible. On the flip side, every time someone knocked on my door for some campaign-related event, I got a little irritated that they were disturbing me in my own home. So I understand why it might be a turn-off for a lot of people. That said, the mayor happened to knock on my door which was pretty cool and did make me rank her higher when I got my ballot.
That last bit: my mother won office in a small town, late in life. I was already familiar with the town, went back there to help her when I had time. Met people who would say that they voted for Candidate X because they came to see them. This was mostly a thing among people who were middle aged or older.
This is why it would be great if every community in America had a main street or a town square, and residents went there to walk around and interact with their communities. That way, politicians could just hang out there and interested voters could initiate conversations with the politicians instead of having strangers bug them at home.
The local area can really make a difference. The main reason I never voted in midterms until my 30s was I wasn't even aware they were going on. I don't even follow politics now, let alone then. There's a chance a phone call may have actually clued me in on an midterm.
But in terms of national politics phone calls were as annoying then as they are now. I'm not going to change my mind because of a random text or call from a stranger! Especially in the last election, where they made it sound like it was life or death. If I already agree with that premise shouldn't they think I'd already be voting?
Isn't the idea mobilization? Ie. call those who you know would vote for you, and simply remind them to vote and than them for voting, because it's important.
But I'd guess TV ads and citylights and jumbotrons (big fucking posters) might help mobilize those who have absolutely no clue about the existence of elections.
For the last couple of cycles, I've been serving as an election official and personally doing my best to make the voting process as quick, seamless, and pleasant as possible. It's been extremely rewarding in a scratch-that-itch kind of way. Then I can throw bags of money at super PACs on the side.
I totally agree with this. I served as an election official in 2020 and found it immensely rewarding for exactly that reason. My experience as a voter with a weird last name was that the process could occasionally be less seamless than it needed to be for reasons more related to the age and technological inexperience (and less the process itself) of the average poll worker, and my experience bore that out. Even at 37, I probably brought the average down by several decades.
Definitely agree with this feeling. Also - what are campaigns going to do with the money? I think the evidence for what campaigns do with money is generally based on some pretty weak evidence. Especially past a certain threshold of money. After that, you're probably just throwing the money away.
This is one reason why I think campaign finance reform ended up causing terrible things. If people could give directly to the party, and the party doled it out so that each candidate got a certain amount, I think it would be wildly more effective - and would make the parties matter again.
Mr. Pinboard Ceglowski shamed some of the tech community into donating to small campaigns across the US (the “Great Slate”) and while the campaigns were very happy about it, it appears that none of it actually helped. Local reachouts don’t matter when voters get all their partisan opinions from TV.
That "certain threshold" definitely is becoming an issue. Earning to give to Beto O'Rourke or Amy McGrath is certainly less effective than calling up a random local official in your neighborhood and volunteering for them.
I think if you took a group of random people and asked them to rethink land use they would end up with the same or more restrictive zoning. I understand the current process is frustrating but I think experts and most elected officials are ahead of most random residents on this who haven’t thought about the issue before, and the political dynamic of how people have an incentive to try to push development elsewhere is still real but held in check by activism and lobbying to some extent. Of course you and others have successfully educated many people but is it most? I’m not so sure.
Counterpoint, of perhaps adding a little texture to this - If you put professionals and a small representative slice of residents into a process for this, *and gave them a specific framework to work towards* you can get a pretty good output. Additionally, in these things, the group/committee/whatever should never be the final voice.
Source - served on a bunch of these, and where it was most valuable was being able to fill in the gaps of the professionals in, say, the land use office of the local gov't. Example - Virginia DOT said "We should see if Rt. 1 in Fairfax can improved into something that moves cars, bikes, pedestrians and mass transit better." A medium sized group was put together w/ VDOT to work that(I served on it). VDOT handed the plan to Fairfax, and said "Figure out some of the mid-level stuff." County put together a group of citizen leadership and county planning and transportation staff. Put together a mid-level framework for things but, and this is crucial, elected officials didn't just rubber stamp things. They took our work, did a little nip and tuck, approved it, and are using that as the guide for the next steps.
The key was to have citizens who had already shown interest in this type of work and brought some form educated perspective to it. Not just the weird old guy who shows up to random meetings to yell about how everything got worse when the Metro opened and Those People started showing up(actual thing that happened at a community meeting I chaired).
"The key was to have citizens who had already shown interest in this type of work and brought some form educated perspective to it. "
How do you differentiate "already shown interest in this type of work" from "busybodies who show up and NIMBY everything"? I mean, part of the problem with many things is the sort of "diffuse benefits specific harms" framework - and the people who show the most interest are the small-but-vocal "specific harms" group.
In your example, how was the "representative slice of residents" picked?
This is going to open the question of if we're just stacking the jury, so to speak, but in this case, various high level stakeholders picked those people. So, the two electeds picked a couple people, a pro-business organization got a seat, each of the major civic groups got a spot. With a group of about 20 or so, any particular crank was going to be counterbalanced.
I've made this argument before, but it is worth repeating. If anyone cares about this stuff, you need to actually get in the game and really think of how to be productive. I ended up on these groups because 1) I'm weird and I enjoy the work 2) I wasn't a crank 3) I could be counted on by those higher up on the food chain to not make myself or others look like fools and 4) I translate technical language into the common tongue. Land use is a very specific language, and you can't make a compelling argument to a wide audience if they can't access your lingo.
At the end of the day, people are going to be people, and there's just no way to remove that. I love the idea of a strong civil service, and I adored the professional staff I worked with. But they had no idea how to communicate in terms normies could understand. I work in IT during the day and it drives me insane when techies talk techie to a non-technical audience.
TL:DR - you need good people controlling the input to the process, or it's just another tool for garbage in/garbage out.
I totally agree that groups of involved residents can often be helpful in a process like the Route 1 in Fairfax one, both to improve the plan and also create community support for the eventual plan. I wasn't referring to that kind of thing, which as you note, was about bringing in people who are already interested in and/or expert in transportation and/or were influential stakeholders.
The "citizen assembly" type idea is about having randomly selected groups of residents make decisions, explicitly arguing that's better than currently powerful and/or expert ones. I don't agree in general and definitely not around urbanist policy subject matter.
There was a Vox article about this idea (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22878118/jury-duty-citizens-assembly-lottocracy-open-democracy) which was much more positive toward it than I would be. And in response to some of the counterarguments, the proponent says that the assemblies should just come up with ideas and then they should be put to a public vote, like a ballot initiative. Which, I think, is even worse because ballot initiatives are subject to most voters not knowing even the smallest amount about an issue and being swayed by ignorance and/or misleading TV ads or something.
"explicitly arguing that's better than currently powerful and/or expert ones"
This isn't what citizens' assemblies are arguing. They argue that they're a better way of hearing from experts because of the incentives motivating the participants i.e., they're there to solve a problem in a way they can all agree on rather than making decisions based on the next election outcome.
These assemblies give people the opportunity and incentives to learn about the problem they're given. They hear from and get to ask questions of experts before making their recommendations. They don't need to be policy matter experts themselves, and it's usually better that they aren't because they're able to arrive at a challenge from many different angles and find a compromise.
Oh, man, yeah, hard nope. My first reaction to that is that it is ripe for coming up with ideas that are actually illegal to pursue for a variety of reasons. And governance by ballot initiative should be launched into the sun. Take care!
I think you're imagining taking a group of random people and giving them one afternoon to rethink land use. But if you took a group of random people and told them, "for the next six months you're on the land use committee instead of doing your old job - learn about land use and think about these issues, and we will pay your salary", you'd probably get something much better. Neighborhood meetings and ballot measures get people's snap judgments, but a committee like this that got the *informed* judgments of a wide swath of people would likely result in something better.
I do believe we have that here.
https://www.sanmateocourt.org/court_divisions/grand_jury/index.php#final_reports
But is that really a problem? If a city fully understands the consequences? In our current situation private property (especially land) is sacred, self-determination of communities is also very much protected, there's no equal opportunity or anything like that for having "good land", so current landowners of a city can do this.
Instead of infighting YIMBYs should move to one place (and then NIMBYs will move away from that place).
Looking forward to "Mailbag: Tokyo Drift" on Japanese housing policy.
Anyone else have their own YIMBY red pill moments they want to share, now that Matt shared his?
Mine was about 15 years ago when a cool looking midrise condo building was being proposed right next to multiple buildings of similar height (thinking the proposed building was in the 8-10 story range) on the same side of a busy street. But oh boy, the neighborhood association on the opposite side of this busy street, a neighborhood that I spent my childhood living next to and spent plenty of time in, they completely lost their shit. They did stunts like tie balloons to a really long string to try to demonstrate the alleged horrors of the height of this building. When I talked to them in their community building effort, their reasoning for opposition was basically "if you approve this building, they'll approve many more like it in our neighborhood in the future!" And when I attended the P&Z meeting over this, that's when I got the full experience of hearing dumb NIMBY comments from people that had the privilege to raise hell in such meetings in person.
The project got reduced to 4 stories, which as far as outcomes go could have been far worse, but it sent me down the path of no return in this regard.
I was a reporter at a small newspaper in Georgia a few years ago, and one of the towns I covered was just a suburban nothing place: all single entrance subdivisions and strip malls. For years, the people wanted to develop a downtown and would bitch about how there was nothing to do there. Then a developer came forward with a plan to basically build a downtown from scratch, with over 90,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space and 800 apartments. Of course, everyone lost their shit over the apartments part.
A Facebook group against the development got 2,000 members in a few weeks and was flooded with comments like "But what happens when it all goes Section 8?" and "We don't want those kind of people living here." One of the town's kindest people, a lady who organized the Special Olympics every year with money out of her own pocket, pulled me aside after a council meeting and said "If Trump doesn't build his wall, and this thing does get built, this whole town will be full of criminals in a couple of years."
The whole plan fell apart a couple months later, even though the developer was revising down his plans to include fewer apartments. I don't think anyone is ever going to try to build anything except subdivisions and strip malls in that town. And if the people that live there want to have a night out or go shopping, they're always going to go somewhere else.
Was this town an actual suburb or just a rural town built in the suburban style? Because the latter would be even more depressing.
It was on the very outskirts of Atlanta, so I guess the former. But it was still plenty depressing. I'll never underestimate status quo bias again.
Ah, the exurbs. They try to have the "best of both worlds" by being both somewhat rural and somewhat urban, but end up being the worst of both worlds instead.
I remember reading about the New York Islanders' attempt to build a new arena for themselves as part of a larger real estate development that would include housing, retail, office space, the works. This was maybe 15 years ago. The team's owner was going to fund all of it with his own money (not the norm for new sports facilities) and it was going to be located on the site of (I believe) an old racetrack that was next to a highway and wasn't being used for anything else. The local politicians sat on the proposal until it died on the vine, saying how concerned they were about how it would tarnish the suburban character of Nassau County. The team ended up moving to Brooklyn.
I'm not an Islanders fan or even much of a hockey fan, but I do generally like sports arenas so I followed the story with some interest and I remember thinking how absurd the whole thing was. Long Island has been decaying for a long time and here you had someone offering to build something cool there, with his own money, for the first time in forever, and the answer was "no thanks"? One of the first times I really realized how irrationally averse Americans are to any development other than McMansions, big box stores, and surface parking.
Mine was as an intern at the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority when they were in the planning stages for an underground garage at the Library Lot. The idea was to put a large mixed use building above the garage since its in the middle of downtown. I was surprised how much "concerns" about character and parking drove the politics the DDA faced, and that housing was seen by so many as only a source of negative externalities. Over a decade later, the garage is there with nothing above it.
Mine was a combination of visiting Japan and seeing the train system there, as well as reading Matt's old blog and The High Cost of Free Parking.
I moved to Silicon Valley for my well-paying tech job and was surprised to find there was nothing here and I couldn’t afford SF. Eventually from that I found Sonja and SFBARF (the founders of YIMBY) who had started just going to every city council meeting and speaking in favor of all infill development.
I'm shocked no one mentioned the truly shocking thing in that chart on the homeless...the homeless population went down almost 10% over the last 13 years! I trust the data comes from a reliable source, so maybe it's only my personal history of living in LA that makes that data so head-spinning.
I take MY's point that if drug addiction is increasing, the homeless data trend runs the opposite way. But it also runs counter to the trends in house prices and affordability! I don't doubt MY's main premise, that homeless is mostly about housing, but it's strange that this chart doesn't seem to support that connection. And since homelessness and housing affordability are not really correlating, you can hardly point out the same lack of correlation with drug abuse and say "see it can't be that!". At least not if you believe it's about affordability.
But also - I question the premise of Tim Lee's particularly question. I don't think we do know that drug addiction, is rising recently. It seems clear that prescription drug addictions and misuse rose through the early 2000s. But the rise of overdose over the last 10 years seems more about stronger opioids, a la fentanyl, than about the size of the addicted population. There's sadly a lack of reliable data on number of drug addicts, but the best I can find shows overall drug use as flat over the last ten years or so:
https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/reports/rpt35325/NSDUHFFRPDFWHTMLFiles2020/2020NSDUHFFR1PDFW102121.pdf
To clarify on fentanyl - it's not really a separate thing people get addicted to. Generally it's added to other opioids, and sometimes to other drugs like cocaine, to strengthen the dose. Imagine you're a dealer with a kg of heroin. Add a little fentanyl and suddenly you can sell 5 or 10 times the "high" with the same amount of product.
At the risk of rambling - I also don't know that fentanyl is associated with mental problems beyond addiction. My understanding is drugs like coke and meth are more likely to trigger violence or mental health disorders. The main "mental" problem with opioids is they are very addicting and that seems to push many people into lying, stealing, other forms of petty crime or other plain stupid things to feed their expensive habit.
Very interesting context to this ongoing discussion, thank you!
I think Wigan's claim is that although opioid *deaths* have been rising, that doesn't tell us that opioid *use* has been - it's compatible with at least the quick summary of the data that opioid use has been constant, while strength of available opioids has grown.
Re: homelessness, I look forward to reading the results of your research into the various causes at work. An additional dimension might be recent changes in how governments/social workers/etc. address homelessness. To the extent those changes do or do not succeed at improving people's lives, they impact homelessness rates over time, too.
For example, Michael Shellenberger has been on the podcasting circuit lately, and he attributes SF's homelessness problem primarily to addiction and mental illness. He has an interesting take about how the incorporation of "victim ideology" (for lack of a better term, on my part) among social workers and other relevant institutions has led to ineffective and counterproductive services for homeless people. On his account, the new changes assume it's immoral to make people with addiction issues at least partly responsible for improving their own situation and to make certain social services contingent on concrete efforts to recover. (It's possible I'm misremembering his specific beliefs/arguments.)
I'm inclined to think something like his account is at least partly true for places like SF, but it'd be interesting to look at when specific changes were made and how that timeline fits with the data cited in this post. (Shellenberger might address this exact question in his new book, which I haven't read.) If you start to see big changes in approach in big cities around 2014, say, then that could be one factor contributing to the rise in unsheltered / chronically homeless since then.
What makes you think someone who is so addicted to a substance that they end up living on the street has any ability to quit? It makes no sense to me.
What I think is advocates have a real issue with someone losing or not having agency. They think if someone decides to stop taking their anti-psychotics or go back to heroin they are making a conscious valid choice. They fundamentally oppose the idea that those decisions are being made by a fundamentally broken brain.
I am a materialist and I am sympathetic to the view that none of us ultimately control are behavior. Certainly, none of us choose our thoughts, or in the case of drug addicts, our compulsions. However, this belief when extended too far, becoming a strong external locus of self control, may be the very thing that's leading people to giving in to their addictions. We know that people who believe in their own self efficacy (i.e. have a strong *internal* locus of self control) are more likely to quit smoking, exercise, and perform well academically. If that's true, (and the correlation doesn't run in the opposite direction) it may be better for us to believe a small lie in the pursuit of a better life. Our beliefs are embedded in the physical systems of our brains as much as an addiction is.
That's very valid if you're talking about someone who got called into their bosses office to discussion performance that's been impacted by their alcoholism. They have a wife and kids and a house and car payment and they say, "I really need to get my s_hit together." But when someone has fallen so far that they've passed out and pi_sed and s_hit themselves in a doorway and are yellow with jaundice - that's a whole different thing.
At least to maintain hope, I guess I have to assume that people with serious addiction problems can eventually quit one way or another. Then the question becomes what's most effective at getting them there. I certainly agree that addiction is a disease of the brain and strongly affects decision-making -- we can't treat the decision to use as a fully conscious or autonomous one. At the same time, I don't think we can assume that people will recover on their own, and it's at least plausible that strong incentives (e.g., "if you want to stay in shelter, you have to test clean this week") are one way to help them improve. But I'm not at all an expert and can be persuaded based on evidence from the field.
I think we need to entertain the idea that, for many of those who have fallen so far that they've ended up on the street, they can't stay clean outside a secure facility.
It's like with any drug. You take 1000 18 year olds and give them a few beers. At one end a couple of them will just not like it - at all. And then you get into the middle and some kids will say, "This is kinda fun." And then as you get to the other end some will say, "This is REALLY fun!!" And then there are a handful that will say, "This is the greatest thing ever, this answers everything, this completes me!"
When you get into the 998th or 999th or 1000th kid you may have someone who has such a powerful reaction to alcohol that they will die from it. They may be so addicted they can't function in society and can't quit under any circumstances outside a secure facility.
I used alcohol because most people have experience with it. People also don't realize that it's just as powerful a drug as any other. People think that if I gave you some heroin you'd instantly become addictted. But the range of responses is similar to alcohol - at one extreme you'd get a headache and feel like crap and have no interest in ever trying it again.
I agree. The fact is, as a society, we are abandoning what I would consider critically ill people to the streets. I consider them critical because they cannot survive without chasing the next high. If left without their drugs and/or alcohol they will decompensate, seize, etc. For the IV drug addicted, they have no serotonin. They are in intractable pain without their drug. Additionally, it is highly likely they have endocarditis. So, to be humane, these individuals should be admitted to secure health facilities where they can safely be dried out/sobered, treated, and sheltered until such time they can be functional people again, clean and sober, possibly returning to their communities via group homes, structured support etc. Otherwise they will die. Many of the addicted have underlying mental health illness and that should be identified and addressed. At this time it is almost impossible to compel an addicted (brain broken) or mentally ill adult (over 18) family member to residential treatment and it is crushingly expensive.
One part of the country, New England, already has the sort of citizen-engaged democracy Kyle asks about in its town meeting form of government. (Towns, legally defined, have twice-a-year meetings in which any registered voter can vote and be heard on major questions facing the town.) The system has much to recommend it (if you’re patient and have a high tolerance for tedium, but maybe all government demands that). But I’m not sure it yields less caution than other forms; if anything, status quo bias seems greater (since older people and long-time residents disproportionately participate). Whether town meetings work and could be exported to the rest of the country might be an interesting topic for a future post.
"if you're patient and have a high tolerance for tedium"
In my experience (multilateral/federal/local), yes, all government demands that!
"...the classic Unseld/Hayes frontcourt from the 1970s...."
Oh my god. How do you know about these guys? They retired before you were born. I'm amazed that people still talk about them.
But, yeah -- it was an awesome collaboration. Wes had the worst knees and the biggest heart in the business. He could block out guys a foot taller, and throw a rebound from under the defensive boards down to his guard at the other basket, easy as looking. Hayes was erratic, sometimes cold, but a solid scorer when he was on. They were both working-class heroes, not prima donnas.
I haven't thought about them in over forty years. Again, I'm amazed that they are remembered.
Citizens' assembly sounds cool except people will try to escape it like jury duty. California did put a lot of effort into making its redistricting commission representative of the population but there were many challenges.
The whole idea of "what if political decision-making, but like juries?", sounds a lot worse if you spend time around juries.
It still may be better than what we got (ie, lawmaking by lobbyists and ALEC) but it ain't going to be paradise.
It’s worse than that though. At least with a trial your presentation of evidence is live, oral, and in-person, plus juries are relatively small, so people feel pressure to at least try to pay attention and understand WTF is going on. Also, most of the kinds of cases that go to jury trial (criminal, personal injury, malpractice, etc.) have some kind of at least moderately interesting narrative to latch onto (even if it’s just the drama of the trial itself). But to get the kind of knowledge needed to make citizens' assemblies work, I don’t know if enough people would bother with the reading, and I’ve seen/been in enough college lectures to know that once class size gets above 20-30 people start to feel they can get away with snoozing.
Yeah my concern is that, plus they'll treat the reading/information like they’re in school and it’s homework. Only a few energized people/teacher’s pets will actually do the reading/viewing/whatever, and only a few of those will actually understand it.
California's Civil Grand Juries might be an interesting model: you have to apply to become a member; the county's judges interview and select candidates, and then the final members are chosen by lottery from the nominees. The jurors then spend a year diving into a few topics (which they choose) in order to produce reports, e.g. https://civilgrandjury.sfgov.org/previousreport.html, http://grandjury.co.la.ca.us/gjreports.html, https://www.imperial.courts.ca.gov/general-information/grand-jury.
The key to making them appealing is to juice up the incentives. Legal juries have lots of issues and there is plenty of criticism and suggestion in the literature.
Some incentives include, paying people plenty of money so they're able to take the appropriate leave or childcare arrangements, give the process authority so people know their time is not going to be wasted, make the time commitment clear from the beginning so people can plan their lives around it.
I think it's important with these innovative approaches to democratic decision making to not have a "cheems mindset" and instead think of the way you could address the possible problems with a proposal.
I mean, sure, and I actually agree with a lot of the proposals around (judicial) juries for like childcare and juror pay. But fundamentally, the problem with policy juries is that most people just aren't that interested in policy, and (unlike a trial or grand-jury indictment) policymaking doesn't lend itself to the kind of narrative/story framework that people who just aren't that interested in policy can latch onto to make themselves interested. It'll just be homework, and (unless you--like me!--were a teacher's pet through 20+ years of schooling) nobody likes homework. The problem is psychological and attitudinal, and there are no good policy solutions to that kind of problem. That's the root of my skepticism of sortition in the policymaking space. (Again, I *don't* have this skepticism when it comes to the judicial system, because the dispute-resolution function of the judiciary necessarily adds the element of narrative and--to be frank--drama that laypeople can get themselves invested in so it feels more like watching a movie than it does homework.)
See California's civil grand juries: https://www.slowboring.com/p/mailbag-2/comment/4784586
+1 on Twitter being a great source of information. I'll even up the temperature on the take and say that I can also find the arguments informative at times, even if they can be tedious. The key is to limit your follows to arguers that you trust can be good at informing you through argument. (Matt of course is one of those follows for me.)
The other thing I'd say about Twitter is that it's best not to participate unless you have some really unique information to share. I registered for a Twitter account just a year or two after it got popular, but I never actually tweeted anything for years until I found a niche of information (that has nothing to do with subject material that would be familiar here at Slow Boring) that had yet to be filled, and once I did that I found a purpose to actually participate. People who use Twitter like any other social media site are the ones that for me are not worth following.
Long-time admirer, recent paid subscriber. The search function produced inconclusive results, so must ask: where are you at on “revenue-neutral tax reform to achieve progressive taxation on all income, regardless of source?” My financial-planner brother thinks that (if we include such arcana as eliminating the Step-up in Cost Basis) we could raise so much more from the capital-rich class that overall brackets would fall for pretty much anyone actually *earning* (payroll/bonus etc) income. Revenue neutrality, I’d like to hope, de-fangs or at least forstalls the fight over the proper size or scope of government. Thoughts?
The section that begins "Suppose that door-knocking" and ends "just as you would if you were knocking on strangers’ doors." was wonderful and could potentially be very impactful.
I'd humbly suggest Matt or others find a way to spread it on Twitter or FB. Maybe even as a pinned tweet (if that's what they're called).
I think the clearest answer to “how much demand is there for dense housing?” comes from places like Manhattan, where 1.5 million people live on the island and rents are still high because the demand outstrips the supply. It’s certainly not what everyone wants, but more people want it than can actually have it right now.
Interesting my experience with aphantasia seems to be slightly different in that I can't really recreate music in my head like that. I'm curious have you never had visual images come to your head? On rare occasion I can sort of briefly visualize a memory/photo though not on command and I'm certain I dream visually.