I think there is a potential untapped alliance between pro-housing types and suburbanites mad at their planning board for making them jump through a billion hoops to build a new deck (looking at you, Montgomery County, MD.) When it comes to things they might do themselves, normal people tend to think that level of regulation is stupid, so I wonder if you could bundle streamlining regulatory review of home projects with legalizing ADUs and duplexes.
I just hope that when the time is right for a big bi-partisan deficit reduction bill that Democrats will actually push for a net tax on CO2 emissions (because climate activists have been pestering them to do this for eons). But it is hard to imagine Republicans ever agreeing to a tax increase of any kind.
“Can you provide examples of YIMBY arguments framed in such a way to make them convincing?”
I think there are several different strands of NIMBY-ism. Maybe most important is just stats quo bias. The people currently living in very restricted land use areas did not create the rules; they just liked things as they were (low density-free parking, whatever). And less restriction thought it would in practice affect few people directly – DC will not become Manhattan – Any one person might fear that THEY will be the unluck one to be affected. The ought to be a better way to “buy out”/compensate super-local objections to development. And most people really cannot see the city-wide benefits of greater development. Like many policy reform problems (trade reform, greater immigration, taxes to reduce the deficit, taxation of net CO2 emissions,: diffuse invisible benefits and visible costs.
Good additional perspective. Maybe the way to think about this is WHAT is "visible" to whom among decision makers and influencers To an economist, the benefits to the city in general of greater housing and business development -- revenues, diversity, incomes and life improvements of the new businesses and residents -- are "visible" but not so much to the people in the ANC who oppose a project.
I’ve recently read Noah Feldman’s The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America, and it seems to me that the fundamental questions around secession are still very much with us internationally. That is certainly the case regarding pre-invasion Ukraine and any possible settlement to the current conflict that I can imagine.
I’m new to your newsletter, so you might have delt with secession in the past. If so, could you point me to where you have discussed this.
If not, I hope you would consider taking up this topic at some point. Specifically, I have in mind these areas:
Secession vs. revolution vs. rebellion vs. civil war: what are the distinctions and what the overlaps.
Secession throughout history.
When is secession legitimate and when not? When is suppression of secession legitimate and when not?
How is secession not inviting an indefinite regress into ever smaller independent regions?
Secession (it now seems to me) as inherently extra-constitutional, regardless of what a given constitution might or might not state. This is a key reason that Jefferson Davis was never put on trial.
Secession as inevitably only settled by military force.
Does the fight for secession and the fight against it fall under international rules of war or any other rules?
If you have suggestions on good sources on this topic, I’d appreciate you passing these on to me. My current list of sources to get to:
Ahsan Butt Secession and Security
David Gordon Secession, State, and Liberty
Allen Buchanan The Morality of Political Divorce
Cynthia Nicoletti Secession on Trial: The Treason Prosecution of Jefferson Davis
I appreciate the clarification on global Georgism. This proposal is totally new to me. Right off, several things you mention about it don't make sense to me.
If land is such that it cannot be owned by people, doesn't that also mean that
it cannot be legitimately owned by governments?
If land cannot be owned, how could it be sold? And if it cannot be sold, how
could it have a market value? And therefore how could this value be equally
redistributed?
How would the (nonexistent market) value of land be redistributed? By a world
government?
If no one owns land, how does a government tax it?
If only a government owns land, how does a government tax its own land?
Is the redistribution a one-time only act? Or does each new born get an equal
redistribution? Does the equal share have to be recalculated with each new birth?
Does the redistribution get passed on through inheritance or at death does it revert to the world government which made the redistribution?
I disagree with Matt's claim that he is being, to some extent, hypocritical in applying differential standards to himself than he applies to his son. Having different standards for people of different ages is not necessarily hypocritical and is often quite reasonable. It would be hypocritical if Matt simultaneously criticized his other parents for allowing their children to behave in a way while Matt allowed his same age child to behave similarly. And how does Matt think he would feel about his son spending all night watching YouTube videos after the son is an adult? I doubt Matt would give it a second thought.
I also found Matt's critique of himself for wasting time on entertainment really bizarre -- he produces more written content per month than probably 90%+ of other pundits working similar beats (dozens of tweets per day; probably something around 10,000 words a week at SlowBoring, plus his Bloomberg column).
clarification please. In reference to Matt's answer on climate change. He thinks *republicans* wouldn't vote for a VAT, right? not Dems. Think there might be a typo.
Some of us discussed this on another thread recently, but I cannot urge YIMBYs strongly enough to make their peace with parking minimums and find ways to work around them rather than fighting them head on. It isn't worth it. There is really nothing wrong with widespread car ownership per se. The problem is car usage, which is not the same thing. Some might complain about the costs of car *storage* but at least in certain parts of cities, there don't need to be any such costs because if we had looser density restrictions, the amount of real estate available for car storage would be limitless (ok not literally, but you get the idea).
Here's a deal I would make if I could get neighbors to agree to it. (1) We build a new high rise. (2) I guarantee that everyone in the building gets a parking spot. (3) The first floor of the building will have retail, and maybe the second floor can be a day care, and then the parking will be on floors 3, 4, and so on. (4) In exchange, the neighbors agree to lift height limits allowing the building to have several more floors of residential space at the top of the building. (5) Residents have to pay for their parking spots. (6) But if your odometer proves that you didn't drive your car very much, you get some kind of rebate, maybe even a 100% rebate if you hardly ever drive at all. (7) The city will give the building owner a property tax break for square footage used to park cars that got the rebate.
Who loses in this scenario? No one. Everybody wins.
Probably no one wins because both indoor parking and high-rises construction are very expensive. There aren't many places where the market will support it.
The ones who lose are the tenants who have to pay for the space they don't actually want. ~ $22,000 per space for an aboveground structure. Amortizing that and adding in $35 or so in monthly maintenance comes to about $130 per month. And many parking requirements will require 2 spaces for 2+ bedrooms. So $260 per month for parking spots you didn't actually want. When you may be just getting by to begin with.
Why? In this scenario, the existence of the parking space is conditional on allowing additional square footage at the top of the building. The supply of residential space remains constant (or perhaps even increases), so the price for tenants would not be any higher than it would be otherwise.
"I generally think that most of the main actors in progressive politics are quite a bit more reasonable than they let on in public but are somewhat trapped in a miasma of bad incentives. I’ve even had people publicly denounce things I wrote based on tips that they themselves suggested!" --> This is (a) good writing, (b) darkly hilarious.
The discussion of hypocrisy brought to mind this old story (I forget where I read it):
An Indian mother was worried about her young son eating too much candy, so she brought him to Gandhi and asked the great man to tell her son to give up candy, hoping that Gandhi's moral authority would make an impression on the boy.
Gandhi told her, "I cannot do this now, but come back in a month and I will tell him then."
The mother was puzzled, but she did as Gandhi said. A month later, she came back with her son, and Gandhi told him: "Young man, listen to your mother. Candy is bad for you. You shouldn't eat so much."
The mother said, "Gandhiji, thank you, but I don't understand. Why couldn't you have told my son this a month ago?"
Gandhi replied, "You see, a month ago *I* was eating too much candy."
On the audiobook, Mike Duncan’s Hero of Two Worlds is a fantastic listen. When he started shilling for it on the Revolutions podcast, it never once crossed my mind to buy the actual book; I knew that it was going to be the audiobook experience of a lifetime.
Robert Kagan, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has called this “adversarial legalism” and shown that it’s a distinctively American way of checking state power. Bagley builds on this argument. “Inflexible procedural rules are a hallmark of the American state,” he writes. “The ubiquity of court challenges, the artificial rigors of notice-and-comment rule making, zealous environmental review, pre-enforcement review of agency rules, picayune legal rules governing hiring and procurement, nationwide court injunctions — the list goes on and on.”
The justification for these policies is that they make state action more legitimate by ensuring that dissenting voices are heard. But they also, over time, render government ineffective, and that cost is rarely weighed. This gets to Bagley’s ultimate and, in my view, wisest point. “Legitimacy is not solely, not even primarily, a product of the procedures that agencies follow,” he says. “Legitimacy arises more generally from the perception that government is capable, informed, prompt, responsive and fair.” That is what we’ve lost — in fact, not just in perception.
Did the US government lose legitimacy at some point in the past such that people want to effectively smother law making in red tape? If the perception is that government is incapable and lazy and therefore does not deserve the benefit of the doubt, would that be wrong?
Yes; adversarial legalism as a technique for state control dates to the late 1960s. (See section "Something Changed" in Kagan, "AdversariaI Legalism and American Government"; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.2307/3325322) It predates Watergate, but not by much, and I should not be surprised if disillusionment following Watergate helped it survive any early backlash.
Today is one those days where I scroll the comments and I find myself agreeing with a comment, seeing it's posted by someone I basically never agree with and instantly turning into GOB and thinking "I've made a huge mistake."
I usually hate when authors read their own work. Donna tartt read I think the secret history and I kept forgetting the main character was a boy and everyone sounded the same and her drawl lulls me to sleep.
“James: Why does Rene Girard, memetic theory, the scapegoat mechanism, etc keep popping up on the Silicon Valley corner of the US right wing? Is it just because they all want to get Peter Thiel to like them or is there some deeper salience for those opposed to modernity? I thought mid-century French Theory was to blame for society’s problems, not a solution? What’s up with that?
I do not have a good explanation for this, or for the similar tendency of conservatives making points about the overreach of the Covid hawks to start quoting Michel Foucault. Personally, the only French theory weirdo I was assigned to read in school was Julia Kristeva and I found her writing very confusing.”
Seems like San Francisco is if you took some of the principles of Hamsterdam and applied it to an entire city instead of a city block.
I think there is a potential untapped alliance between pro-housing types and suburbanites mad at their planning board for making them jump through a billion hoops to build a new deck (looking at you, Montgomery County, MD.) When it comes to things they might do themselves, normal people tend to think that level of regulation is stupid, so I wonder if you could bundle streamlining regulatory review of home projects with legalizing ADUs and duplexes.
Thank you Matt. Very cool!
I just hope that when the time is right for a big bi-partisan deficit reduction bill that Democrats will actually push for a net tax on CO2 emissions (because climate activists have been pestering them to do this for eons). But it is hard to imagine Republicans ever agreeing to a tax increase of any kind.
“Can you provide examples of YIMBY arguments framed in such a way to make them convincing?”
I think there are several different strands of NIMBY-ism. Maybe most important is just stats quo bias. The people currently living in very restricted land use areas did not create the rules; they just liked things as they were (low density-free parking, whatever). And less restriction thought it would in practice affect few people directly – DC will not become Manhattan – Any one person might fear that THEY will be the unluck one to be affected. The ought to be a better way to “buy out”/compensate super-local objections to development. And most people really cannot see the city-wide benefits of greater development. Like many policy reform problems (trade reform, greater immigration, taxes to reduce the deficit, taxation of net CO2 emissions,: diffuse invisible benefits and visible costs.
Good additional perspective. Maybe the way to think about this is WHAT is "visible" to whom among decision makers and influencers To an economist, the benefits to the city in general of greater housing and business development -- revenues, diversity, incomes and life improvements of the new businesses and residents -- are "visible" but not so much to the people in the ANC who oppose a project.
I’ve recently read Noah Feldman’s The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America, and it seems to me that the fundamental questions around secession are still very much with us internationally. That is certainly the case regarding pre-invasion Ukraine and any possible settlement to the current conflict that I can imagine.
I’m new to your newsletter, so you might have delt with secession in the past. If so, could you point me to where you have discussed this.
If not, I hope you would consider taking up this topic at some point. Specifically, I have in mind these areas:
Secession vs. revolution vs. rebellion vs. civil war: what are the distinctions and what the overlaps.
Secession throughout history.
When is secession legitimate and when not? When is suppression of secession legitimate and when not?
How is secession not inviting an indefinite regress into ever smaller independent regions?
Secession (it now seems to me) as inherently extra-constitutional, regardless of what a given constitution might or might not state. This is a key reason that Jefferson Davis was never put on trial.
Secession as inevitably only settled by military force.
Does the fight for secession and the fight against it fall under international rules of war or any other rules?
If you have suggestions on good sources on this topic, I’d appreciate you passing these on to me. My current list of sources to get to:
Ahsan Butt Secession and Security
David Gordon Secession, State, and Liberty
Allen Buchanan The Morality of Political Divorce
Cynthia Nicoletti Secession on Trial: The Treason Prosecution of Jefferson Davis
I am unfamiliar with the term "Georgism" and don't find it even in the OED. What does
global Georgism mean for you? Is being a George like being a Karen?
I appreciate the clarification on global Georgism. This proposal is totally new to me. Right off, several things you mention about it don't make sense to me.
If land is such that it cannot be owned by people, doesn't that also mean that
it cannot be legitimately owned by governments?
If land cannot be owned, how could it be sold? And if it cannot be sold, how
could it have a market value? And therefore how could this value be equally
redistributed?
How would the (nonexistent market) value of land be redistributed? By a world
government?
If no one owns land, how does a government tax it?
If only a government owns land, how does a government tax its own land?
Is the redistribution a one-time only act? Or does each new born get an equal
redistribution? Does the equal share have to be recalculated with each new birth?
Does the redistribution get passed on through inheritance or at death does it revert to the world government which made the redistribution?
I disagree with Matt's claim that he is being, to some extent, hypocritical in applying differential standards to himself than he applies to his son. Having different standards for people of different ages is not necessarily hypocritical and is often quite reasonable. It would be hypocritical if Matt simultaneously criticized his other parents for allowing their children to behave in a way while Matt allowed his same age child to behave similarly. And how does Matt think he would feel about his son spending all night watching YouTube videos after the son is an adult? I doubt Matt would give it a second thought.
I also found Matt's critique of himself for wasting time on entertainment really bizarre -- he produces more written content per month than probably 90%+ of other pundits working similar beats (dozens of tweets per day; probably something around 10,000 words a week at SlowBoring, plus his Bloomberg column).
clarification please. In reference to Matt's answer on climate change. He thinks *republicans* wouldn't vote for a VAT, right? not Dems. Think there might be a typo.
No, I don't think so. Democrats would likely oppose a VAT because it's regressive.
Some of us discussed this on another thread recently, but I cannot urge YIMBYs strongly enough to make their peace with parking minimums and find ways to work around them rather than fighting them head on. It isn't worth it. There is really nothing wrong with widespread car ownership per se. The problem is car usage, which is not the same thing. Some might complain about the costs of car *storage* but at least in certain parts of cities, there don't need to be any such costs because if we had looser density restrictions, the amount of real estate available for car storage would be limitless (ok not literally, but you get the idea).
Here's a deal I would make if I could get neighbors to agree to it. (1) We build a new high rise. (2) I guarantee that everyone in the building gets a parking spot. (3) The first floor of the building will have retail, and maybe the second floor can be a day care, and then the parking will be on floors 3, 4, and so on. (4) In exchange, the neighbors agree to lift height limits allowing the building to have several more floors of residential space at the top of the building. (5) Residents have to pay for their parking spots. (6) But if your odometer proves that you didn't drive your car very much, you get some kind of rebate, maybe even a 100% rebate if you hardly ever drive at all. (7) The city will give the building owner a property tax break for square footage used to park cars that got the rebate.
Who loses in this scenario? No one. Everybody wins.
Probably no one wins because both indoor parking and high-rises construction are very expensive. There aren't many places where the market will support it.
The ones who lose are the tenants who have to pay for the space they don't actually want. ~ $22,000 per space for an aboveground structure. Amortizing that and adding in $35 or so in monthly maintenance comes to about $130 per month. And many parking requirements will require 2 spaces for 2+ bedrooms. So $260 per month for parking spots you didn't actually want. When you may be just getting by to begin with.
Why? In this scenario, the existence of the parking space is conditional on allowing additional square footage at the top of the building. The supply of residential space remains constant (or perhaps even increases), so the price for tenants would not be any higher than it would be otherwise.
You still have to pay to build and maintain the parking garage levels (even if no additional land is used).
Oh who cares. That's pretty minimal. Will happily take that to get the extra square footage.
"I generally think that most of the main actors in progressive politics are quite a bit more reasonable than they let on in public but are somewhat trapped in a miasma of bad incentives. I’ve even had people publicly denounce things I wrote based on tips that they themselves suggested!" --> This is (a) good writing, (b) darkly hilarious.
The discussion of hypocrisy brought to mind this old story (I forget where I read it):
An Indian mother was worried about her young son eating too much candy, so she brought him to Gandhi and asked the great man to tell her son to give up candy, hoping that Gandhi's moral authority would make an impression on the boy.
Gandhi told her, "I cannot do this now, but come back in a month and I will tell him then."
The mother was puzzled, but she did as Gandhi said. A month later, she came back with her son, and Gandhi told him: "Young man, listen to your mother. Candy is bad for you. You shouldn't eat so much."
The mother said, "Gandhiji, thank you, but I don't understand. Why couldn't you have told my son this a month ago?"
Gandhi replied, "You see, a month ago *I* was eating too much candy."
On the audiobook, Mike Duncan’s Hero of Two Worlds is a fantastic listen. When he started shilling for it on the Revolutions podcast, it never once crossed my mind to buy the actual book; I knew that it was going to be the audiobook experience of a lifetime.
"Judging these things more by the results and less by a checklist seems wise to me. "
That's also kind of the core point of Ezra's latest polemic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/29/opinion/biden-liberalism-infrastructure-building.html
<blockquote>
Robert Kagan, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has called this “adversarial legalism” and shown that it’s a distinctively American way of checking state power. Bagley builds on this argument. “Inflexible procedural rules are a hallmark of the American state,” he writes. “The ubiquity of court challenges, the artificial rigors of notice-and-comment rule making, zealous environmental review, pre-enforcement review of agency rules, picayune legal rules governing hiring and procurement, nationwide court injunctions — the list goes on and on.”
The justification for these policies is that they make state action more legitimate by ensuring that dissenting voices are heard. But they also, over time, render government ineffective, and that cost is rarely weighed. This gets to Bagley’s ultimate and, in my view, wisest point. “Legitimacy is not solely, not even primarily, a product of the procedures that agencies follow,” he says. “Legitimacy arises more generally from the perception that government is capable, informed, prompt, responsive and fair.” That is what we’ve lost — in fact, not just in perception.
</blockquote>
Did the US government lose legitimacy at some point in the past such that people want to effectively smother law making in red tape? If the perception is that government is incapable and lazy and therefore does not deserve the benefit of the doubt, would that be wrong?
Yes; adversarial legalism as a technique for state control dates to the late 1960s. (See section "Something Changed" in Kagan, "AdversariaI Legalism and American Government"; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.2307/3325322) It predates Watergate, but not by much, and I should not be surprised if disillusionment following Watergate helped it survive any early backlash.
Today is one those days where I scroll the comments and I find myself agreeing with a comment, seeing it's posted by someone I basically never agree with and instantly turning into GOB and thinking "I've made a huge mistake."
I usually hate when authors read their own work. Donna tartt read I think the secret history and I kept forgetting the main character was a boy and everyone sounded the same and her drawl lulls me to sleep.
WTF are u guys talking about ? ...
“James: Why does Rene Girard, memetic theory, the scapegoat mechanism, etc keep popping up on the Silicon Valley corner of the US right wing? Is it just because they all want to get Peter Thiel to like them or is there some deeper salience for those opposed to modernity? I thought mid-century French Theory was to blame for society’s problems, not a solution? What’s up with that?
I do not have a good explanation for this, or for the similar tendency of conservatives making points about the overreach of the Covid hawks to start quoting Michel Foucault. Personally, the only French theory weirdo I was assigned to read in school was Julia Kristeva and I found her writing very confusing.”