My experience is that extreme-normie arguments for YIMBY work fine -- for instance "it helps people live near their children and grandchildren" or "it means that as you grow older, losing your drivers license doesn't mean losing your freedom."
On the internet, we get used to arguing with people that apply an ideological framing to everything, but that's because people on the internet (myself included) are weird.
I had a friend who is very concerned about the environment ranting about all the new buildings going up. I said, “It’s so people don’t need to drive everywhere and can live closer to work.” “Oh, grumble grumble, that makes sense.”
The issue is their default framing is that building new buildings is bad for the environment. When the opposite is true.
Yeah, as a YIMBY working to persuade normal people, the NIMBY arguments you're trying to counter here usually aren't complex ideologies either. They're ideas like, "People should be able to keep their views," and, "More people means more traffic and a longer commute." All you need to do is sell a narrative that's as emotionally satisfying as those in a sentence or two.
Most of the time, you don't need it. Most normies aren't NIMBYs - it's important to remember that most people don't care if apartments go up nearby. There happens to be a 20% of people that want to Karen every issue to death and have an opinion on things, especially things that represent changes they don't like.
I don't have to explain YIMBY to normies, because it's like explaining "you shouldn't cheat on your spouse". We know people do iit sometimes, but it's pretty obviously bad.
Nothing could be further from the truth! As a rule people don’t like change. Especially when that change relates to what is likely their most valuable asset.
Sure, if a coal plant is being plopped down by their house, sure. Or a prison.
Growing up in middle class suburbs, nobody gave a second thought to an apartment complex coming into the area. Even in SF, you tend to see the same literal 5 people come into these community meetings about zoning ranting about the newcomers.
Granted, often some of the uber-NIMBYs do very effective scare tactic campaigns targeted at normies that change the narrative. My personal preference is to paint the NIMBYs who foment fear as the emotionally unbalanced people they are. Especially given the rhetoric you see like "OH NO, THIS NEIGHBORHOOD WILL BE RUINED BY SOMEONE BUILDING A ROWHOUSE".
You can usually just quote NIMBYs as a way to demonstrate to normies just how irrational they are. At least in cases where the thing being fought against isn't that bad (i.e. rowhouses or duplexes v toxic waste dumps)
I think in some places it’s pretty bad. I live in Camden (a relatively dense, comparatively high-income part of London), and a proposed big housing development on a former industrial site was torpedoed by huge numbers of public comments focused on things like it casting shade on a big park and public swimming pool. It was admittedly a big development (hundreds of housing units), not a few townhouses, but there were something like a thousand public comments against it.
I wonder if there is a class element to this. My understanding is that the UK might be one of the only countries where there is an explicit class hierarchy even more than the US (could be wrong... but that's my understanding).
This may be more of a thing the further upmarket you go, often as a way to make sure an area stays exclusive?
You're point is well taken that "status quo bias" is very real everywhere (the secret sauce as to why getting gun control passed is so hard). Having said that, the above point from "Aaron" is actually well taken. As much "status quo bias" as people have, it really is a very small number of people who show up at these zoning meetings or initiate lawsuits that prevent buildings going up. And these people are wildly unrepresentative of the population at large.
Reality is, while it is very difficult to build things, there is genuinely not one place where literally nothing changes. There is always road construction going on (Btw somehow all these arguments about how traffic will get back with construction of buildings somehow doesn't apply with all the other types construction that disrupt traffic, but I digress). My point is, most people are use to a situation where say a restaurant is now being converted into a bank branch because the restaurant closed or some new sushi place is going up. The building of three duplexes being built around the corner from your house might be annoying to a "normie" but is probably not inviting some actual electoral backlash.
I agree to some extent that YIMBYs over-index on online socialist opponents, but in larger cities many of the NIMBY arguments are wrapped up in leftist language. In San Francisco for example, I found that new development was opposed on the grounds that it would displace existing low income residents with rich techies while enriching corporate developers. Not to mention an absolute aversion to anything remotely capitalistic. E.g., supply and demand arguments for decreasing rents would be flat out rejected as “neoliberalism”.
At times I wonder if these arguments could be reversed to paint NIMBYism as a form of crony capitalism. We could speculate that the biggest and most politically connected corporate developers are leveraging their power to monopolize the local market by owning the zoning process. This allows them to drive out small developers that would otherwise be building more units and thereby providing the additional housing that our community desperately needs. These big corporate developers could even be financing astroturf campaigns that disguise their political stooges as champions of social justice so that they can continue to control the zoning process on behalf of their corporate overlords.
Make it an identity politics issues. Note that families like the Kushners love restrictive zoning. Their business model is buying up regular middle class or working class apartment complexes and reaping the rental income. No new construction means they can jack up rents with minimal improvements to the Property because that's where market rents are going. Or they identify "under performing" properties to purchase, put in cap-ex of about 7-8% of purchase price, charge rent premiums of anywhere between $300-$400 over previous rents. And due to lack of competition from an new construction, they'll see those rent premiums and the existing tenants have to move out. And in three years time, sell the Property for 50-75% more than you bought it based on the increase income.
Long story short, just show up and say "Want to make Jared Kushner happy? Block these duplexes from being built"
Living in Long Island, this argument isn't as necessary. But I suspect an argument that could work on a lot of people would be "wouldn't be nice to have a Pub/restaurant like Cheers maybe not next to your house but a five minute walk from your house so you can hang out with some friends, have a few beers and safely walk home instead of drive?"
I wonder about this framing. The corollary to "you can do what you want with your own property!" is "your next-door neighbor can do what he wants with his property!"
Based on experience, and risk-aversion attitudes, I believe the latter is stronger -- and a greater disincentive -- than the former is a positive incentive.
(By the way, this is why I think the Democrats are missing the argument on parental involvement in classroom curriculum/discussions/etc. Rather than saying, "Teachers (and administrators!) should have freedom about what they teach in their classes," the angle should be "do you want that single loudmouth parent we all hate to determine how your kid is going to be taught?")
Also I think and I say this with no data that people can be YIMBY in general and then turn all NIMBY with their actual own backyards. Manny Matt has said this I think? People are up in arms in my city about the apartments going up having people that don’t pay enough taxes using the local public services but i for some reason doubt they would accept those arguments for other cities. They are aware it’s not a coherent policy sort of they just bring a different level of anxiety and concern over projects in their own community.
We had a bunch of right wingers on the ballot in recent school board elections locally, and they basically all lost even in conservative suburbs. Even the typical Republican parent probably doesn’t want some guy named “Robert E Lee III” (actual candidate name) deciding what the curriculum should be!
Yeah, and I think a big part of it is less about the abstract density good/density bad proposition and more about the practical fact that housing is deeply entangled with a whole lot of other serious lifestyle choices that depend on a lot of collective decision making that is vulnerable to disruption.
Even if everyone in principle agrees that a high rise is a good idea in the middle of a suburb, there are a ton of knock-on effects related to resourcing the new schools/police/sewers/whatever that the development requires, and these issues will individually have to be resolved over several years. Even if everything goes great and everyone eventually agrees that the end state is better, it really does mean that the surrounding community will have to put up with a bunch of individually minor but collectively substantial disruptions for years while everything shakes out.
The only real way to address that concern is to build confidence in the local government’s ability to manage that transition well, which is super hard in part because a lot of local governments really are managed extremely poorly.
Can confirm this is the case in Turkey, I often cite this too. My grandma got an even better version of this because she had a tiny home on a giant lot.
On YIMBY framing, one of my regular observations is pointing out that if people said that they didn't want foreigners from another country moving to their town, they'd be pretty clearly called out as racist and xenophobic. But when people say the same about fellow Americans moving in, hardly anyone bats an eye. (For example, out here in the West, "Don't Californicate [state I live in]" has long been a thing.)
Well, recently a rather left wing friend of mine threw an inverted curveball at me saying she just wanted anyone *but* Americans to move into town. I forget how I tried to shift my framing but boy that one was a doozy.
A counterpoint: I live in Missoula, where median home prices hit $600K. Missoula zoning allows for ADUs. Construction season used to take winter off; now its all year round. There are condos and apartment buildings sprouting up all over. None of it makes a damn difference; rents and home prices continue to climb. Incomes are not. It's not just a supply issue; buyers from out of state are gleefully accepting outrageously high prices here because they look like a bargain compared to their home (CA, Boston, Seattle, etc.) market. Slowly, a (large town? small city?) with an ascendant middle class and healthy economy is turning into a super-sized Vail. I am very YIMBY, but that's an inadequate suite of solutions to this problem.
Missoula has a history of accepting refugees, and on one hand I think that's great. On the other, I worry about the 2nd and 3rd generations who will be born into a poverty trap city with little upward prospects and a career path that's basically "be a bartender for rich kids."
People from out of town gleefully accepting the increased prices ought to mean that were this extra supply not available prices would skyrocket even more?
Limiting the supply wouldn't make it unavailable to outside buyers, though, who would still be able to purchase whatever housing does come on the market.
I think I explained myself poorly. Say there are 100 units, and 200 outside bidders and 200 local bidders. If all the outside bidders have higher wealth and income than all the local bidders, then the market price of the units reflects the wealth and income of the outsider bidders, not the local bidders. I just want to disallow the outside bidders from participating in the local market.
that distinction is not black and white, and as long as America is is a free country, there's no mechanism for doing what you want. I hope you have some empathy for Trump voters just wanting to keep the foreigners out though since you basically are one
that's just the very same issue as every coastal city, and YIMBY-ism absolutely is the solution. lots of people want to live in missoula because it's a nice place to live. those people are spending on places and driving prices up. the solution is to provide more places. Missoula is interesting because of how Covid affected it. I know it wasn't used to dealing with coastal city problems before and all the demand happened at once. but the only way out is through.
This is genuinely the most ironic post of all time. YIMBY is good, but not in... my... backyard?
Firstly, these issues pre-date COVID, though the pandemic housing rush exacerbated prices. Median home price was over 400K pre-pandemic; that's just shy of 10x median annual income.
Secondly, Missoula is not a nice place to live. It is, as stated, increasingly expensive. It used to have a vibrant local music and arts scene. That's evaporated as the artists and musicians can't afford to live here anymore. Transit is mediocre, at best (though the bus is free, which is nice). The university is bleeding enrollment. The schools are struggling. Homelessness is up, as are drug deaths. The kinds of prestigious, advanced careers that attract people to coastal cities don't exist here, and neither do the wages.
I am YIMBY. I support YIMBY. Missoula is relatively YIMBY. But Missoula's experience suggests that sometimes, a YIMBY market alone won't solve out of control housing costs.
Real Vail has tried the opposite approach and is even worse though. And as someone who has lived in Manhattan, I am confident that genuinely terrible housing will still command a high price if the area is desirable enough. Once an area becomes desirable, the law of supply and demand just makes it very difficult to avoid the problems of high prices solely by constricting supply
Broadly, I don't know. I think YIMBYs are too eager to rely solely on market solutions. In some areas, greed and speculation will outpace any market correction, and there I think you need increased government input: sales taxes on non-resident buyers, maybe, or more set-asides for low-income homes and housing. Specifically to Missoula, our fairgrounds were set aside at the edge of town in the 60s. Now the edge of town is the middle. I'd love to move the fairgrounds and develop the current area, but local elderly NIMBYs loathe that idea. We also have a lot of abandoned buildings that have been unused for decades; I'd like an eminent domain push against those owners. Use it or lose it.
That's just weird but would probably be indistinguishable from a policy perspective since it's not really possible to specifically block Americans. So "yeah, sure that's fine as long as you build the homes" is reasonable. Technically, anything NIMBY your friend does would be anti-immigrant since the only consumers of the potential housing are immigrants (which is equally weird but she set herself up for it) if you're in debate mode.
I have made it my personal mission in life to point this out to every NIMBY progressive I talk to. You are literally trying to build a wall around the good neighborhoods. I thought you hated building the wall.
I would not recommend this tactic, people are not persuaded and do not respond well. but the hypocrisy drives me bonkers (I know, I read what Matt wrote about hypocrisy here).
Civil rights left NIMBYs tend to be the most hypocritical, socialist left NIMBYs tend to be the most stubborn and ideological purist, while right NIMBYs tend to be the most evil.
I'm not sure I'd give many Republican "intellectuals" credit for actually understanding Foucault, but, if some of them are quoting him, I suspect the reason is that Foucault's description of power and discipline as something more pervasive and thick than just state power, diffused through many institutions and relationship in society, speaks to the feeling a lot of conservatives are expressing of being on the losing end of a culture war and coercive change through many parts of society - the corporate world, media, etc.
>And the worst thing the corporate world can do to you is to fire you, but there are millions of other employers you can work for and tens of millions of Americans are fired every year but quickly find a new job
This is an oddly blasé attitude. Surely, for most people, the risk of losing one's job is the most serious threat they face on a daily basis? Sure, the last couple of years, we have had an economic environment that's forgiving for people looking for work, but this is not the normal condition. And when it's not, the difference between keeping and losing one's job can be the difference between being able to pay your mortgage and living where you want to live; the difference between a happy and successful marriage and a bitter divorce: the difference between having a comfortable office job or taking a job that slowly degrades your health and wellbeing. In that context, being told you must adhere to new and uncomfortable social mores and conventions at your corporate job would be highly alienating and scary. Now no one's entitled to these jobs and companies should be free to associate with whoever they want, but we have to at least acknowledge the power they have here
“You can also shield yourself from being fired by living below your means so you have a sufficient financial cushion that being fired doesn't set off that kind of downward spiral, and keep your skills up so that you can find another job easily.”
That’s easier said than done for the average voter - to put it mildly. I would also add that kind of rhetoric is on the decline on the right as rural and working class voters move toward the Republican Party.
No I don't think it's BS. Foucault was onto something. There's a reason why his more comprehensive description of power, going far beyond formal state power, has long spoken to people who are or feel themselves to be on the margins of society, whether that be people who don't conform to gender norms, cultural conservatives, or others.
In all honesty, I find this point of view genuinely baffling--so much so that I don't think we can really find a plausible middle ground of agreement here.
Suffice to say
(i) I strongly endorse Derek Tank's point above regarding the significance of employment,
(ii) I think humans as a social species are hugely susceptible to the influence of culture and the views, approbation and censure of other humans and that this has a tremendous impact on their wellbeing
(iii) I think many people agree with (ii) and that this is why the Culture Wars are a Thing
(iv) Surely gay and lesbian issues and related identity issues--both from the perspective of LGBT+ wellbeing as well as the massive intergenerational disparities in LGBT+ identifying persons as well as the rise essentially ex nihilo of identities like non-binary are relatively tangible and available examples of concrete time-variant culture effects? (Just to choose an example with high current salience). Per this article from the BBC yesterday, 76% (!!!) of people who identify as non-binary in the U.S. are 18 to 29. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220601-the-invisible-obstacles-of-non-binary-dating)
As I said above, however, I think our views on this are at heart more or less totally irreconcilable.
I'm quite sympathetic to your functional view, but I think you can get the specifics wrong.
I was raised as a liberal Christian, and found a lot of it quite alienating. This wasn't so much because I thought the church was a bad environment, that I disagreed with the truth claims, due to feeling like religious people were hypocrites, etc. It was more feeling the weight of the expectations that I would find it meaningful.
Now, the nice thing about liberalism is that we (including my parents) value individual autonomy and cosmopolitanism, so I had the ability to make the final decisions on my own without having to leave everyone I knew behind. However, if I had grown up in a conservative small town, that wouldn't have been the case.
Where I suspect we agree is the implication that liberal culture is coercive in most circumstances. There are exceptions, and those exceptions can loom large in the Discourse (and are more salient among college educated people), but I'm skeptical that too many people have experience with it firsthand. That doesn't mean I always agree with every DEI initiative that comes along of course, but being more thoughtful about our words and actions is usually sensible.
I don't think this is accurate. The vast majority of discrimination in this country is not done by the government - its done in the corporate, media, social world. And those are so much more pervasive through most peoples lives that they matter a great deal more than government action. To use the old analogy: corporate, media, etc. are the dog and government action is the tail.
And the fact that we have employment discrimination laws, and that people want them to be kept up to date with changing cultural mores shows that in practice most people intuitively understand this. Formal codification of changing cultural values is often controversial because it marks a clear breakpoint but in a democracy is generally a lagging indicator of change.
I don't think your answer on the administrative state fairly grapples with the issue. Executive discretion to making changes in the staffing allocation or administration of the executive branch itself (your examples) is not in the same category as making changes in policy and binding rules of behavior that apply to private actors.
The question was positing a tension between more proportional electoral mechanisms and a strong administrative state, though, and like Matt I don’t see any tension there. To whatever extent that you want the legislature to oversee, manage, and override the bureaucracy, why wouldn’t you want that legislature to be representative of the electorate? A minoritarian Senate is not less likely to try to hamstring the regulators.
You can agree or disagree about whether, in our system, the duly elected Congress should make laws and major political, versus unelected bureaucrats in the Executive Branch. But that's the debate, not who should control deployment of FBI staffing levels in a given city, which is so off-point that it almost seems like a bad faith deflection from what the debate is about.
I don't think it's bad faith at all, I think it's exactly correct. The issue here, I think, is that you disagree and therefore don't like the framing. But it does very much capture my view: the "bureaucratic" state -- also essentially the managerial state -- should have fairly wide discretion to execute its duties, with checks in place by a properly representative legislative branch (and of course a judicial branch).
Publicly owned corporations work this way, except the balance of power is massively in favor of the professional managerial staff. I don't think that the government should be run like a public corporation, but the basic notion that the executive branch should have reasonable discretion to performs its duties makes sense.
Framing can be done in good faith, but only when the framer understands and acknowledges the true objections of his audience. I doubt there is anyone who decries the administrative state as being out of control who has the FBI's personnel decisions in mind. The objection is actually for situations where the president's party cannot muster a majority in Congress to implement a policy, e.g., Congress wouldn't entertain a vaccine mandate law and so, hey, look: OSHA has had that authority all along!
There is a difference between executing duties and making law. To use MY's FBI example, the FBI should not be deciding what is and is not a crime, and what sentences should be, what parole conditions are, etc. This may be an extreme example, but lawmaking, not just law enforcement, is what many other executive agencies do. Now, that is most likely because Congress gave up lawmaking power to that agency, and we can have that different argument if you want, but it still isn't consistent that many people who want to make it procedurally easier for Congress to make law also would rather have executive agencies make the law instead. This even applies to people currently in Congress. For example, Elizabeth Warren's proposed price-gouging law would grant I believe the FTC the authority to determine what price-gouging is, rather than, you know, Congress.
Yeah. Also, the one of the most countermajoritarian features of the Senate—the filibuster—directly makes it *harder* to control the administrative state by preventing Congress from passing legislation.
Matt dude I've been a subscriber since Day 1 but it's weird to me that you conceive of yourself as doing a "calmer" approach to politics when you're in Day 2 of a Twitter Beef with Perry Bacon Junior. The righteous pugilism of telling Dems they should deprioritize gun control the week after Uvalde is what I like about you, but it's not about being 'calmer or more rational'.
I may be missing some context on the thread but Perry clearly called out Matt and Matt responded quite substantively and calmly. There may have been some snark but the relentless attacks on Matt and implications that he's a closet rightist must get very tiring.
it seems matt is either not capable of or not interested in grappling with the negative externalities of his social media usage. it's a very weird disconnect
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.
On the question about Rene Girard- I’m currently reading “Wanting” by Luke Burgis and it’s on exactly this (Girard, mimetic desire, scapegoating, even an appearance from Thiel). Maybe this book is a symptom of the trend or it’s a cause, probably both. But it’s a good book and not at all “right wing” (or left wing) despite the Thiel references.
Burgis presents the concept of mimetic desire (basically, humans don’t tend to just want things on our own, we instinctively look around us for models to determine what we should want) as pretty earth-shattering, but to me it’s a somewhat obvious inference to make after reading “The Secret of our Success” and learning about the concept of cultural evolution. But I’m still enjoying the book, it’s a quick and easy read.
Burgis references Thiel and “Zero to One” fairly often, though always keeping him a bit at arms length and acknowledging he is controversial. He does not go full fan-boy for Thiel, just Girard. But apparently Thiel was a student of Girard’s.
Where are folks seeing it pop up in right wing circles? I’m curious. I learned about it through Chloe Valdary, who I follow for her anti-racism work but she herself is a big Jordan Peterson fan. But shes pretty heterodox generally. Given how much my brain was messed up by decades of critical race theory, Im permanently skeptical of falling too deep into a “this theory explains everything about the world” rabbit hole. But the basic claims seem uncontroversial enough. (Note that I’m only just at the point in the book where the author goes from “describing” to “proscribing,” which is where things often go off the rails.)
The Rosetta Stone for understanding the Silicon Valley Right and why they find Girard so congenial is elitism. There’s a small number of heroic creators who are responsible for progress and so maximizing their freedom of movement matters a ton, and the interests of everyone else don’t really matter.
Girard buttresses that by explaining that people’s interests aren’t even authentically theirs, they’ve just absorbed them from others nearby through a process that doesn’t have any connection to truth or virtue and therefore doesn’t have any moral weight. You see this in talk about “NPCs” who mindlessly latch onto “the Current Thing.” The thing that makes it all click together is the Thiels and Andreesens don’t think mimesis is about *them*. It’s Gerard For Other People.
The Silicon Valley Neo-feudalists are the *only* argument in favor of “billionaires are policy mistakes;” they turn that theory into a genuine theory of self-defense.
IDGAF how much genuine value someone created, if they’re Peter Thiel, I am completely ok with having their assets confiscated to the last nickel and then having them hanged.
Just like to note that "I'd like my political opponents to be robbed and killed" is a crazy view, and lowers the credibility of whatever else you might say. To about zero.
To be clear, I’m not advocating the one-off extrajudicial punishment and execution of one person. I’d shed no tears if he were to die in an accident, anymore than a Russian serf would cry for a lord who fell from a horse. But Thiel isn’t the problem, just a manifestation of it.
The actual problem at hand… is that we now have the historical evidence to understand that vast concentrations of private wealth are *just* as dangerous to liberalism and democratic, pluralist governance as vast concentrations of government power, if not more so.
They positively breed radicalism *and* give individuals the power to exploit that opening to their own ends. Cultural restraint, broad-based support for democracy, and civic virtue are all insufficient constraints on elite behavior.
Aside from capitulating and accepting that republican governance will for many generations be little more than Populares vs Optimates, an unending cycle of proscription and counter-proscription, with the little people caught up in the gears of self-interested intra-elite competition, there are only two policy alternatives, to my mind.
First, and in my opinion more radical; we simply don’t allow concentrations of wealth to exist in excess of a certain amount. Not only does this by definition create a huge disincentive to investment and innovation, it also is extraordinarily difficult to legislate and enforce.
Which leads us to the second, and IMO only workable, option: rather than relying on the goodwill and self-restraint of those with enough money to develop their own armed forces, we codify a conception of treason and insurrection which prevents the extremely wealthy from translating their wealth into the power to threaten pluralist governance itself.
TL;DR: The things Peter Thiel and others do with their money must made illegal and punishable by the modern equivalent of proscription. It is the only way to keep them from undermining pluralist governance and turning the Republic (and every other democracy) into their personal playthings over the coming two generations.
Thiel is legitimately a threat to liberal democracy, but more for the persuasiveness of his ideas than for his money per se. He's a small fish dollar-wise relative to Musk, Bezos, Gates, or Buffet. But trying to fix that by greatly broadening the definition of treason is destroying the village to save it. Charges of disloyalty are a core part of the reactionary nationalist program, and they're always going to be more effective at using them than liberals are. We couldn't even make an impeachment stick on a lame-duck Trump when he fomented an insurrection on live television and his own party leaders would have been thrilled to have him disqualified by it from running again. For contrast, the W administration launched a secret international network of illegal torture prisons.
I think the only way to protect liberalism from the oligarchs is to have *effective* democratic government. You've got to keep tacking towards "people should generally get the government they want" and blowing up various inside games that develop, because they're always going to be better at inside games than we are over the long run. So nuke the filibuster, brush back aggressive judicial review, try to replace gerrymandered single-member-district legislatures with some kind of PR.
(This is why I'm such a fan of sortition-based methods)
Peter Thiel is spending hundreds of millions to try to turn me and 7-odd billion others into serfs and likely kill several hundred million of us (at minimum) in the doing. As was specifically pointed out above, he does not regard us as human.
I am merely returning the favor.
I am completely morally comfortable with advocating that he be executed by the state. In an even vaguely just world I would live long enough to see exactly that.
So cancel culture is out of control but it is still a good idea to endorse state execution of citizens for literal thought crimes. Gotcha.
Of which you are also apparently guilty by your own admission (assuming the crime is "not regarding people as human and advocating their death" anyway; maybe the crime is just "being someone David R doesn't like")!
If your definition of free speech encompasses “spending vast sums of money to overthrow democratic and republican governance everywhere and reduce humanity to slaves”, then more power to you, go seek Ted Cruz’s endorsement for a Supreme Court seat.
To me, that falls under the headline of treason, crimes against humanity, or both.
I believe he’s human… I just have no qualms enacting the death penalty on humans for such crimes.
Thiel is just so obviously weird and is like a stereotypical movie villain. Democrats need to do a better job of highlighting their worst/craziest opponents just like Republicans do with the “abolish the police” types, so the Thiels of the world become unwitting political assets instead of threats to democracy
I definitely think that people can have interests that aren’t authentically their own. People who buy into scams are a clear example. Ironically, a major vector of scams is the current web3 fiasco from the tech industry, with the shitcoin cryptocurrencies and NFT rug pulls.
I read that book while still a libertarian in my early 20s, and the immorality and contempt for the poor was eye opening as someone who had tried to talk myself into conservatism being good for society as a whole and not just for rich people. I credit Rand for making me a liberal, honestly (albeit a neoliberal since I still think markets work)
Though in response to the questions in the episode description: "Have you ever wondered why the decisions you make keep leaving you unfulfilled? How you'll doggedly pursue something - a career, a relationship, some Big Life Goal - and once you've finally got it, you find yourself underwhelmed?"
Nope! I'm right where I want to be and feel quite fulfilled in my career, relationships, and at achieving my life goal.
I think you may have tapped in to why this appeals to Silicon Valley tech bros like a pseudo-religion while just being mildly interesting to the rest of us.
I am not remotely connected to this world so I can’t make any statements about the weird way this concept is being discussed/applied. But the basic claim that “most of us want what the people around us want, or actively reject what the people around us want” seems straightforward and pretty true. And yeah the virality of the concept itself would seem like a point in its own favor. For whatever it’s worth, Burgis certainly admits it applies to him and claims Thiel does too. (I know Thiel is a “bad guy” and I find him vaguely creepy but I don’t know much about him at all outside of what I’ve read about the “new right”/gray mirror crap.)
Yeah it’s not like there’s nothing to it; the idea of mimetic desire (and the idea of scapegoating) definitely describes a real thing that happens. Seeing that potential in Facebook in 2004 was a huge insight! The question is how central you should make that to your understanding or the world and your moral framework.
From what I've seen it's basically a call for a return to pre-modern violence against a communal target so as to allow for society to function smoothly and all of modernity's problems are because we can't be scapegoat-violet so we just do more generally violent stuff. Or something. I'm only recently even aware of the whole line of thinking so it's not something I really understand.
As a blanket delegitimization of criticism. In Gerard, the Scapegoat role is filled without regard for guilt or innocence. So the move is to hop from “I am being blamed for this independent of the role I played in causing it” to “I played no role in causing it.”
I first encountered Girard when I went to work at Thiel’s hedge fund in 2008. Pretty sure I just started with the Wikipedia description of his writing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Girard
Characterizations of how Girard influences SV right wingers are my own, based on their public statements. Haven’t discussed that interpretation with any of the principals.
Burgis, Thiel and Girard each use no restraint in claiming "mimetic desire" is a sweeping "theory of everything." So yes, covers all those and more! Burgis is a product of Silicon Valley himself, so a lot of his examples are related to the way people there get caught up in the rat race. He even tells stories of (possibly) contagious suicide in the Tony Hsieh "Downtown Project."
Always wanted a fancy watch. So thankful my wife bought me one, wear it every day with pride. A little disappointed it is not considered remotely fancy by watch people, but I’m ok with it I guess I’m doing my best to succumb to mimetic impulses? Also would trade in any of the super fancy watches folks have for that one my dad bought me in high school that I left in a bathroom. Maybe the antidote to mimetic values is sappy sentimentalism?
Girard would probably say the reason you desire the watch is that you’re mimicking your father and the perception that he liked the watch he gave you? Who knows!
Thiel, obviously, is one of the people who promotes this ideology but I also see it commonly referenced by people like Tyler Cowen (not himself a totally right-wing person!), various VCs (Jonathan Bi being a recent example), and is talked about on techie forums, podcasts, etc. Also mentioned by the dark enlightenment types. Like I said, it's not "the ideology of silicon valley" as some might suggest but I feel like I am seeing it appear with more frequency.
Gotcha. Check out the book, it’s not brainwashing or anything, best I can tell. I can see where it could be used to justify nefarious rabbit holes though, just as Darwin’s theory of evolution was used to justify eugenics. I don’t think it’s inherently immoral or amoral though.
Does the book do a good job of justifying the various parts of these theories? Is there, like, *evidence* for these claims about scapegoats and mimesis? What data supports the position that all human beings everywhere on the planet only desire things because they see other people desiring them? Did Girard do a survey?
Or scapegoating! Did pre-modern societies actually operate on this principle? Looking at, say, Hammurabi's code, it does not appear scapegoating is a meaningful part of how his justice operated. Is referencing the old testament really a universal claim to the origins of human society? I thought we moved beyond that.
This is why the whole french theory thing gets a bit out of hand to me. There's this tendency to make sweeping generalizations about the nature of the human mind and the functioning of past societies but never a solid attempt to mark these beliefs to the real world.
Not that you have to answer these questions just what that pops into my mind whenever I read about this stuff.
Absolutely fair questions and the general answer is no, the book does not do any data-crunching or show any broad studies to support these claims. Just anecdotes and historical examples. Not to say there aren't lots of studies that *could* support these claims- the Asch conformity study comes to mind, as one. But I think you're right that this runs the same risk as all the other "theories" where they claim to be so self-obviously true that they skip over the part where they test their claims, even when those claims go from narrow/trivial ones that maybe don't need to be tested, to sweeping/prescriptive/tyrannical.
"The Secret of Our Success" is far more academic/rigorous, and not actually about Girard or mimesis, but I think does a better job of laying out a unified theory of why humans copy each other (to create, test, improve upon, and pass along cultures).
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."
Huh, I'm in the exact opposite camp regarding authors reading their own works; I look on it as a red flag and rarely get those audiobooks. My sense is that "writing a good book" and "reading a book aloud well" are two completely different skillsets that don't necessarily overlap and, in fact, rarely do. Is this just a silly bias on my part?
I agree that the two skillsets don't necessarily have any bearing in each other, but rather than using it as a red flag I'd just read the reviews. If they read it well, great, if not then I'd skip it.
This is a general principle I think people fall victim to too often. In this case the OP wants to say author reading means it's good and you want to say the opposite.
I say, instead of having some set of rules, you can just...check.
I would like to argue a step beyond "hypocrisy is weak tea" and say that *for most people*, hypocrisy is the only morally acceptable way to live your life.
To attempt to justify this claim, and at the risk of being extremely weird, I will explain my reasoning not in prose but in a dialogue excerpt from a play I wrote (never yet produced and frankly not ready to be produced):
__________________
SAUL
What are the alternatives?
(He takes three shrimp from the rabbi's plate and lays them side by side, on the table.)
There are three kinds of people in the world, and only three: saints, villains, and hypocrites. Right?
ZEV
I don't know that I agree but you can go on.
SAUL
Well who else is there?
ZEV
Whatever, say I concede, what's your point?
SAUL
(Pointing to the shrimp)
Saints, villains, hypocrites. Well, sainthood is in very short supply. It's out of reach for most of us.
(SAUL puts one shrimp back on the plate.)
ZEV
Yes.
SAUL
So if you find yourself imperfect and unable to always live up to your own standards, you have two choices: either keep telling the moral truth as you see it and accept that you will be seen correctly as a hypocrite, or else lower your standards to meet your weaknesses, i.e., undermine your principles just to avoid being a hypocrite. And what could be more self-centered than that? In fact, doing that makes you a villain. And you don't want to be a villain.
(He puts one more shrimp back on the plate.)
Once you realize you're not perfect, hypocrisy is the only moral choice.
ZEV
Okay. As a result, okay. But not as a mission, not as your North Star.
SAUL
Whatever. The point is, what you're doing is important.
ZEV
How is it important? Everyone else is a hypocrite too.
SAUL
But you admit the hypocrisy! That's no small thing!
ZEV
Admitting it doesn't make it okay.
SAUL
But not admitting it would make it worse. It's like— There are two kinds of hypocrite. Two levels. You're a hypocrite because you preach one thing and do another.
ZEV
Yeah, that's what it means.
SAUL
But there's a step beyond that. The worse kind of hypocrite—the kind most people are!—preaches one thing, does another thing, and at the same time he swears up and down that he lives by what he preaches. He's a hypocrite who also pretends to be a saint!
ZEV
Okay.
SAUL
So what we should do, what we have to do, is be the good kind of hypocrite. The humble kind. Right? Be the honest hypocrite. Honestly preach a vision of morality, and even when you fail to live up to it, which is often, honestly be willing to say so publicly. That's what you do. I see you doing it!
ZEV
Yes.
SAUL
And that's what I want to do! That's what I've been searching for, for the past eight years of feeling torn in half between two worlds!
(He picks up the remaining piece of shrimp.)
Shrimp is not kosher! Jews should not eat shrimp! Ritual law trains our self-control and binds us together as a people and gives our lives meaning! Eating kosher makes our deepest philosophy and our shared history and our shared future all into something that's real in our bodies! Jewish law is not optional and it is not part-time! For a Jew to eat shrimp is to reject his heritage, attack his integrity, and uproot his soul!
(He eats the piece of shrimp.)
Shrimp is delicious! And the rest of it is all still true!
Up early again here in Mountain Time. So one of my lists.
1. Irony.... Matt says if he were boss he would build all the housing and clear all the homeless, but then a few paragraphs later says the evidence for focused deterrence is poor. Clearing homeless but providing housing/treatment is the definition of focused deterrence. It's the real reason why Europe has few homeless but laxer drug laws.
B. The whole gun thing and length of sentencing is so clearly wrong. Long sentences don't deter crime is one of those things that gets repeated ad nauseum but without evidence. When you start studying, the sentences go like.... long sentences hardly reduce crime... as in they do reduce crime, but not enough to justify the authors progressive sensibilities.
And whenever they talk about his subject, its always about deterrence. That's because like Matt said, deterrence is more about catching and punishing more people.
What they never talk about is incapacitation. The fact is that keeping hardcore high prevalent criminals in jail for a long time until they age out does reduce crime, and combined with a high catch rate, it works well.
3a. I love Matt, well I love all humans, but I really enjoy his work, but the spoken word is not his forte. His reading voice (I sampled One Billion Americans) wasn't the best. Though at least the audiobook isn't filled with fillers like "like" ... listen to Matts podcasts.
d. Questions for Milan: How was Amsterdam? I know it's famous for weed (and I know you smoke), but the bar scene was always my favorite. I could ask if you tried the red lights but I don't expect an answer. I will confess that when I lived in Holland as a young single man, I hit them occasionally. (Don't judge me people). I do miss the Netherlands.
e. I completely agree about hypocrisy being overrated. I am hypocritical about 1000 things. All we can do is acknowledge and move on.
Different subject: I just bought an RV to live in while I remodel my cabin which I bought to replace an RV I sold. I'm a total buy high sell low guy. Heading to the Cabin in Granite, Oregon this weekend.
Related Subject: We are getting so much rain in the North West lately. Hopefully it means an easy fire season.
"When you start studying, the sentences go like.... long sentences hardly reduce crime... as in they do reduce crime, but not enough to justify the authors progressive sensibilities."
No. Each year added to a person's sentence is another year the government needs to hire prison guards to watch him, buy food to feed him, buy clothes to clothe him, and forgo any income taxes he might pay on his job outside of prison. The point is that long sentences reduce crime less than the corresponding amount of money getting spent on police (or social services).
When you take all prisoners yes. If you did a cost analysis of the chronic criminals then the maths flips. Gun possession crimes. Robbery in possession. Brandishing a weapon. Shooting someone.
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."
I feel Matt is soft peddling some of the more effective, ugly aspects of ‘tough on crime’ policing.
Four young men are found in a car containing an illegal handgun. Everyone in the car could face a 10 year sentence or a 1 year sentence with a bail requirement they are unlikely to be able to meet. Or they can be released without bail to face any charge again from 1 year to 10. The difference in the bail req is much more impactful than the sentence pursued. It’s effect is much more immediate and that is both the deterrence and incapacitation that primarily matters, not what punishment they might face in 18 months after trial.
We have a procedural understanding of justice that unfortunately does not line up with actual crime control very well. And it lines up with ‘public order’ even worse.
Far better than bail reform would be a process for adjudicating quickly! Our legal system has a wide range of powers, rights, and responsibilities based on argumentation and essentially divorced from the reality of actually processing cases through a courtroom.
My additional concern here is generally in regards to how enforcement actually works. Tough on crime and cracking down on guns nearly universally means aggressively harassing a ton of poor people. It would be one thing if the discussion was about coupling stronger enforcement with community investment, ending the drug war, reforming bail, funding public defenders appropriately, holding politicians/police/authority figures accountable for corruption, collaborating with neighborhoods for improvements, and building relationships between people and police. But it isn't. We are back to the 90's where everyone is talking about heavy handed policing. There is no reason to believe this goes any differently.
I expect nobody that can afford a subscription here currently faces the sorts of harassment poor people get from police. If anyone has experienced it in the past, you will know what I mean. It is awful to be constantly run down by people in uniform, looked down upon for stupid shit like busted tail lights that you can't afford to deal with and then spending hours waiting in cuffs while police literally tear your car to pieces looking for guns you don't have. They don't fix it, they don't apologize, they don't care. It destroys your life, it destroys your children's lives, it destroys communities, and it perpetuates violence.
I tend to think we could build out surveillance in the style of London metro and do less direct contact. This has its own trade offs.
And of course people are free to say they like the tradeoff of a government they can trust not to harass them over a government they trust to keep guns off the street.
All I mean to say is, if police stop someone and they have an illegal gun and then put that person immediately in jail that has a strong effect. It doesn’t have to be forever.
On the other hand the cops can make just as many stops, piss off just as many citizens, find the same guy with gun and issue him a summons to appear in court at some point which, after he skips, a bench warrant will be issued and then lost because the warrants division had a ton of brutality claims against it (they aways do) and has been disbanded……. Well it just doesn’t move the needle as much on gun crime even if it’s seems closer to our ideal of procedural justice to some.
I think they were doing something like this in Chicago and I think it was sort of working. But their department has big problems and if I remember correctly businesses stopped cooperating with Chicago PD as a result.
You seem to think that interactions between the police and the poor people are universally the same across the very many cities and states and police departments of this country.
Not every department has a 100% adversarial relationship with the community they serve, even in poor neighborhoods. Not every poor neighborhood even has a big problem with gun crime.
You are absolutely right that it isn't universal. It isn't my intention to blame all police departments. But good relationships between police and community at least appear rare and in practice actual people don't really differentiate between one department and the next. Which isn't bad general practice given how really bad actors just jump from department to department.
How would you know how rare good relations are? If I read the NYTs they appear rare. If I go by life experience they seem fairly common.
Same goes for bad actors jumping from dept to dept. It would be really nice to see actual data. Instead I almost exclusively see anecdotes, and those are almost devoid of larger context (why do bad police get rehired - what's the incentives?) and entirely ignore the examples where police are screened and / or fired, which happens quite a bit from what I've read.
Yes, I'm don't face harassment the way many poor people seem to be harassed by police.
But I'm _ALSO_ not worried about living in a neighborhood with a high crime rate and a lot of gun violence - the sort of thing which ALSO destroys your life, children's lives, communities, and perpetuates violence.
There can be good and bad versions of more aggressive crackdown policies (stop-and-frisk seems like a pretty bad one) but since it comes with both consequences AND benefits, it's worth considering where we want to be on the tradeoff and how we can maximize upsides vs. downsides.
(Edit: Changed first sentence to clarify what I meant - sounded originally like I wasn't worried that people are being harassed, I meant that I'm not currently facing it myself) (Edited the edit: Added a 'not') (Is that enough edits? :fingers crossed:)
I certainly agree with you there. I am confident there is a good way to do this. I am not convinced we are capable of doing those things in the current environment and in practice good approaches appear to be rare to nonexistent. Dropping the hammer is dropping the hammer.
Sounds like U are ok with the one guy getting in trouble for the gun crime just not the ten on criminals getting harassed to get the one...I agree with that. Some of this is increasing police professionalism. Gun crimes and crime and punishment in this country is complicated. I think just acknowledging that is what people don’t want to do a lot of the time.
Long sentences an area where I blame broken courts. These are used as a tool to intimidate folks into plea bargains, all to obscure that US lawyers have settled on an understanding of procedural justice such that courts actually cannot process most of the cases we need to bring. And the costs tend to out weight the benefits when we do actually go to trial.
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).
My experience is that extreme-normie arguments for YIMBY work fine -- for instance "it helps people live near their children and grandchildren" or "it means that as you grow older, losing your drivers license doesn't mean losing your freedom."
On the internet, we get used to arguing with people that apply an ideological framing to everything, but that's because people on the internet (myself included) are weird.
I had a friend who is very concerned about the environment ranting about all the new buildings going up. I said, “It’s so people don’t need to drive everywhere and can live closer to work.” “Oh, grumble grumble, that makes sense.”
The issue is their default framing is that building new buildings is bad for the environment. When the opposite is true.
Yeah, as a YIMBY working to persuade normal people, the NIMBY arguments you're trying to counter here usually aren't complex ideologies either. They're ideas like, "People should be able to keep their views," and, "More people means more traffic and a longer commute." All you need to do is sell a narrative that's as emotionally satisfying as those in a sentence or two.
Most of the time, you don't need it. Most normies aren't NIMBYs - it's important to remember that most people don't care if apartments go up nearby. There happens to be a 20% of people that want to Karen every issue to death and have an opinion on things, especially things that represent changes they don't like.
I don't have to explain YIMBY to normies, because it's like explaining "you shouldn't cheat on your spouse". We know people do iit sometimes, but it's pretty obviously bad.
“ Most normies aren't NIMBYs”
Nothing could be further from the truth! As a rule people don’t like change. Especially when that change relates to what is likely their most valuable asset.
Sure, if a coal plant is being plopped down by their house, sure. Or a prison.
Growing up in middle class suburbs, nobody gave a second thought to an apartment complex coming into the area. Even in SF, you tend to see the same literal 5 people come into these community meetings about zoning ranting about the newcomers.
Granted, often some of the uber-NIMBYs do very effective scare tactic campaigns targeted at normies that change the narrative. My personal preference is to paint the NIMBYs who foment fear as the emotionally unbalanced people they are. Especially given the rhetoric you see like "OH NO, THIS NEIGHBORHOOD WILL BE RUINED BY SOMEONE BUILDING A ROWHOUSE".
You can usually just quote NIMBYs as a way to demonstrate to normies just how irrational they are. At least in cases where the thing being fought against isn't that bad (i.e. rowhouses or duplexes v toxic waste dumps)
I think in some places it’s pretty bad. I live in Camden (a relatively dense, comparatively high-income part of London), and a proposed big housing development on a former industrial site was torpedoed by huge numbers of public comments focused on things like it casting shade on a big park and public swimming pool. It was admittedly a big development (hundreds of housing units), not a few townhouses, but there were something like a thousand public comments against it.
I wonder if there is a class element to this. My understanding is that the UK might be one of the only countries where there is an explicit class hierarchy even more than the US (could be wrong... but that's my understanding).
This may be more of a thing the further upmarket you go, often as a way to make sure an area stays exclusive?
You're point is well taken that "status quo bias" is very real everywhere (the secret sauce as to why getting gun control passed is so hard). Having said that, the above point from "Aaron" is actually well taken. As much "status quo bias" as people have, it really is a very small number of people who show up at these zoning meetings or initiate lawsuits that prevent buildings going up. And these people are wildly unrepresentative of the population at large.
Reality is, while it is very difficult to build things, there is genuinely not one place where literally nothing changes. There is always road construction going on (Btw somehow all these arguments about how traffic will get back with construction of buildings somehow doesn't apply with all the other types construction that disrupt traffic, but I digress). My point is, most people are use to a situation where say a restaurant is now being converted into a bank branch because the restaurant closed or some new sushi place is going up. The building of three duplexes being built around the corner from your house might be annoying to a "normie" but is probably not inviting some actual electoral backlash.
I agree to some extent that YIMBYs over-index on online socialist opponents, but in larger cities many of the NIMBY arguments are wrapped up in leftist language. In San Francisco for example, I found that new development was opposed on the grounds that it would displace existing low income residents with rich techies while enriching corporate developers. Not to mention an absolute aversion to anything remotely capitalistic. E.g., supply and demand arguments for decreasing rents would be flat out rejected as “neoliberalism”.
At times I wonder if these arguments could be reversed to paint NIMBYism as a form of crony capitalism. We could speculate that the biggest and most politically connected corporate developers are leveraging their power to monopolize the local market by owning the zoning process. This allows them to drive out small developers that would otherwise be building more units and thereby providing the additional housing that our community desperately needs. These big corporate developers could even be financing astroturf campaigns that disguise their political stooges as champions of social justice so that they can continue to control the zoning process on behalf of their corporate overlords.
Make it an identity politics issues. Note that families like the Kushners love restrictive zoning. Their business model is buying up regular middle class or working class apartment complexes and reaping the rental income. No new construction means they can jack up rents with minimal improvements to the Property because that's where market rents are going. Or they identify "under performing" properties to purchase, put in cap-ex of about 7-8% of purchase price, charge rent premiums of anywhere between $300-$400 over previous rents. And due to lack of competition from an new construction, they'll see those rent premiums and the existing tenants have to move out. And in three years time, sell the Property for 50-75% more than you bought it based on the increase income.
Long story short, just show up and say "Want to make Jared Kushner happy? Block these duplexes from being built"
Living in Long Island, this argument isn't as necessary. But I suspect an argument that could work on a lot of people would be "wouldn't be nice to have a Pub/restaurant like Cheers maybe not next to your house but a five minute walk from your house so you can hang out with some friends, have a few beers and safely walk home instead of drive?"
I wonder about this framing. The corollary to "you can do what you want with your own property!" is "your next-door neighbor can do what he wants with his property!"
Based on experience, and risk-aversion attitudes, I believe the latter is stronger -- and a greater disincentive -- than the former is a positive incentive.
(By the way, this is why I think the Democrats are missing the argument on parental involvement in classroom curriculum/discussions/etc. Rather than saying, "Teachers (and administrators!) should have freedom about what they teach in their classes," the angle should be "do you want that single loudmouth parent we all hate to determine how your kid is going to be taught?")
Also I think and I say this with no data that people can be YIMBY in general and then turn all NIMBY with their actual own backyards. Manny Matt has said this I think? People are up in arms in my city about the apartments going up having people that don’t pay enough taxes using the local public services but i for some reason doubt they would accept those arguments for other cities. They are aware it’s not a coherent policy sort of they just bring a different level of anxiety and concern over projects in their own community.
We had a bunch of right wingers on the ballot in recent school board elections locally, and they basically all lost even in conservative suburbs. Even the typical Republican parent probably doesn’t want some guy named “Robert E Lee III” (actual candidate name) deciding what the curriculum should be!
Yeah, and I think a big part of it is less about the abstract density good/density bad proposition and more about the practical fact that housing is deeply entangled with a whole lot of other serious lifestyle choices that depend on a lot of collective decision making that is vulnerable to disruption.
Even if everyone in principle agrees that a high rise is a good idea in the middle of a suburb, there are a ton of knock-on effects related to resourcing the new schools/police/sewers/whatever that the development requires, and these issues will individually have to be resolved over several years. Even if everything goes great and everyone eventually agrees that the end state is better, it really does mean that the surrounding community will have to put up with a bunch of individually minor but collectively substantial disruptions for years while everything shakes out.
The only real way to address that concern is to build confidence in the local government’s ability to manage that transition well, which is super hard in part because a lot of local governments really are managed extremely poorly.
Can confirm this is the case in Turkey, I often cite this too. My grandma got an even better version of this because she had a tiny home on a giant lot.
On YIMBY framing, one of my regular observations is pointing out that if people said that they didn't want foreigners from another country moving to their town, they'd be pretty clearly called out as racist and xenophobic. But when people say the same about fellow Americans moving in, hardly anyone bats an eye. (For example, out here in the West, "Don't Californicate [state I live in]" has long been a thing.)
Well, recently a rather left wing friend of mine threw an inverted curveball at me saying she just wanted anyone *but* Americans to move into town. I forget how I tried to shift my framing but boy that one was a doozy.
I'm always amused by the people with "Don't Californicate X" bumper stickers proceeding to pass laws that restrict building housing.
A counterpoint: I live in Missoula, where median home prices hit $600K. Missoula zoning allows for ADUs. Construction season used to take winter off; now its all year round. There are condos and apartment buildings sprouting up all over. None of it makes a damn difference; rents and home prices continue to climb. Incomes are not. It's not just a supply issue; buyers from out of state are gleefully accepting outrageously high prices here because they look like a bargain compared to their home (CA, Boston, Seattle, etc.) market. Slowly, a (large town? small city?) with an ascendant middle class and healthy economy is turning into a super-sized Vail. I am very YIMBY, but that's an inadequate suite of solutions to this problem.
Missoula has a history of accepting refugees, and on one hand I think that's great. On the other, I worry about the 2nd and 3rd generations who will be born into a poverty trap city with little upward prospects and a career path that's basically "be a bartender for rich kids."
People from out of town gleefully accepting the increased prices ought to mean that were this extra supply not available prices would skyrocket even more?
If this supply were not available to outside buyers, prices would be capped by the poorer local market.
Limiting the supply wouldn't make it unavailable to outside buyers, though, who would still be able to purchase whatever housing does come on the market.
I think I explained myself poorly. Say there are 100 units, and 200 outside bidders and 200 local bidders. If all the outside bidders have higher wealth and income than all the local bidders, then the market price of the units reflects the wealth and income of the outsider bidders, not the local bidders. I just want to disallow the outside bidders from participating in the local market.
that distinction is not black and white, and as long as America is is a free country, there's no mechanism for doing what you want. I hope you have some empathy for Trump voters just wanting to keep the foreigners out though since you basically are one
that's just the very same issue as every coastal city, and YIMBY-ism absolutely is the solution. lots of people want to live in missoula because it's a nice place to live. those people are spending on places and driving prices up. the solution is to provide more places. Missoula is interesting because of how Covid affected it. I know it wasn't used to dealing with coastal city problems before and all the demand happened at once. but the only way out is through.
This is genuinely the most ironic post of all time. YIMBY is good, but not in... my... backyard?
Firstly, these issues pre-date COVID, though the pandemic housing rush exacerbated prices. Median home price was over 400K pre-pandemic; that's just shy of 10x median annual income.
Secondly, Missoula is not a nice place to live. It is, as stated, increasingly expensive. It used to have a vibrant local music and arts scene. That's evaporated as the artists and musicians can't afford to live here anymore. Transit is mediocre, at best (though the bus is free, which is nice). The university is bleeding enrollment. The schools are struggling. Homelessness is up, as are drug deaths. The kinds of prestigious, advanced careers that attract people to coastal cities don't exist here, and neither do the wages.
I am YIMBY. I support YIMBY. Missoula is relatively YIMBY. But Missoula's experience suggests that sometimes, a YIMBY market alone won't solve out of control housing costs.
if it's not a nice place to live why are so many people paying so much to live there?
Real Vail has tried the opposite approach and is even worse though. And as someone who has lived in Manhattan, I am confident that genuinely terrible housing will still command a high price if the area is desirable enough. Once an area becomes desirable, the law of supply and demand just makes it very difficult to avoid the problems of high prices solely by constricting supply
Any thoughts on what you think would make the suite of solutions adequate?
Broadly, I don't know. I think YIMBYs are too eager to rely solely on market solutions. In some areas, greed and speculation will outpace any market correction, and there I think you need increased government input: sales taxes on non-resident buyers, maybe, or more set-asides for low-income homes and housing. Specifically to Missoula, our fairgrounds were set aside at the edge of town in the 60s. Now the edge of town is the middle. I'd love to move the fairgrounds and develop the current area, but local elderly NIMBYs loathe that idea. We also have a lot of abandoned buildings that have been unused for decades; I'd like an eminent domain push against those owners. Use it or lose it.
why bother with taxes let's just build a wall and keep the non-residents out?
Thanks. And Boise's going to have its own drama over similarly situated fairgrounds some day.
That's just weird but would probably be indistinguishable from a policy perspective since it's not really possible to specifically block Americans. So "yeah, sure that's fine as long as you build the homes" is reasonable. Technically, anything NIMBY your friend does would be anti-immigrant since the only consumers of the potential housing are immigrants (which is equally weird but she set herself up for it) if you're in debate mode.
The problem with america is all these darn Americans!
I have made it my personal mission in life to point this out to every NIMBY progressive I talk to. You are literally trying to build a wall around the good neighborhoods. I thought you hated building the wall.
I would not recommend this tactic, people are not persuaded and do not respond well. but the hypocrisy drives me bonkers (I know, I read what Matt wrote about hypocrisy here).
Civil rights left NIMBYs tend to be the most hypocritical, socialist left NIMBYs tend to be the most stubborn and ideological purist, while right NIMBYs tend to be the most evil.
I'm not sure I'd give many Republican "intellectuals" credit for actually understanding Foucault, but, if some of them are quoting him, I suspect the reason is that Foucault's description of power and discipline as something more pervasive and thick than just state power, diffused through many institutions and relationship in society, speaks to the feeling a lot of conservatives are expressing of being on the losing end of a culture war and coercive change through many parts of society - the corporate world, media, etc.
>And the worst thing the corporate world can do to you is to fire you, but there are millions of other employers you can work for and tens of millions of Americans are fired every year but quickly find a new job
This is an oddly blasé attitude. Surely, for most people, the risk of losing one's job is the most serious threat they face on a daily basis? Sure, the last couple of years, we have had an economic environment that's forgiving for people looking for work, but this is not the normal condition. And when it's not, the difference between keeping and losing one's job can be the difference between being able to pay your mortgage and living where you want to live; the difference between a happy and successful marriage and a bitter divorce: the difference between having a comfortable office job or taking a job that slowly degrades your health and wellbeing. In that context, being told you must adhere to new and uncomfortable social mores and conventions at your corporate job would be highly alienating and scary. Now no one's entitled to these jobs and companies should be free to associate with whoever they want, but we have to at least acknowledge the power they have here
“You can also shield yourself from being fired by living below your means so you have a sufficient financial cushion that being fired doesn't set off that kind of downward spiral, and keep your skills up so that you can find another job easily.”
That’s easier said than done for the average voter - to put it mildly. I would also add that kind of rhetoric is on the decline on the right as rural and working class voters move toward the Republican Party.
No I don't think it's BS. Foucault was onto something. There's a reason why his more comprehensive description of power, going far beyond formal state power, has long spoken to people who are or feel themselves to be on the margins of society, whether that be people who don't conform to gender norms, cultural conservatives, or others.
Counterpoint: culture exists?
In all honesty, I find this point of view genuinely baffling--so much so that I don't think we can really find a plausible middle ground of agreement here.
Suffice to say
(i) I strongly endorse Derek Tank's point above regarding the significance of employment,
(ii) I think humans as a social species are hugely susceptible to the influence of culture and the views, approbation and censure of other humans and that this has a tremendous impact on their wellbeing
(iii) I think many people agree with (ii) and that this is why the Culture Wars are a Thing
(iv) Surely gay and lesbian issues and related identity issues--both from the perspective of LGBT+ wellbeing as well as the massive intergenerational disparities in LGBT+ identifying persons as well as the rise essentially ex nihilo of identities like non-binary are relatively tangible and available examples of concrete time-variant culture effects? (Just to choose an example with high current salience). Per this article from the BBC yesterday, 76% (!!!) of people who identify as non-binary in the U.S. are 18 to 29. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220601-the-invisible-obstacles-of-non-binary-dating)
As I said above, however, I think our views on this are at heart more or less totally irreconcilable.
I'm quite sympathetic to your functional view, but I think you can get the specifics wrong.
I was raised as a liberal Christian, and found a lot of it quite alienating. This wasn't so much because I thought the church was a bad environment, that I disagreed with the truth claims, due to feeling like religious people were hypocrites, etc. It was more feeling the weight of the expectations that I would find it meaningful.
Now, the nice thing about liberalism is that we (including my parents) value individual autonomy and cosmopolitanism, so I had the ability to make the final decisions on my own without having to leave everyone I knew behind. However, if I had grown up in a conservative small town, that wouldn't have been the case.
Where I suspect we agree is the implication that liberal culture is coercive in most circumstances. There are exceptions, and those exceptions can loom large in the Discourse (and are more salient among college educated people), but I'm skeptical that too many people have experience with it firsthand. That doesn't mean I always agree with every DEI initiative that comes along of course, but being more thoughtful about our words and actions is usually sensible.
I don't think this is accurate. The vast majority of discrimination in this country is not done by the government - its done in the corporate, media, social world. And those are so much more pervasive through most peoples lives that they matter a great deal more than government action. To use the old analogy: corporate, media, etc. are the dog and government action is the tail.
And the fact that we have employment discrimination laws, and that people want them to be kept up to date with changing cultural mores shows that in practice most people intuitively understand this. Formal codification of changing cultural values is often controversial because it marks a clear breakpoint but in a democracy is generally a lagging indicator of change.
I don't think your answer on the administrative state fairly grapples with the issue. Executive discretion to making changes in the staffing allocation or administration of the executive branch itself (your examples) is not in the same category as making changes in policy and binding rules of behavior that apply to private actors.
Came here to say this. The administrative state is effectively a shadow legislature, especially now that Congress is absent from most policy making.
This is also why fights over the judiciary are bigger now.
The question was positing a tension between more proportional electoral mechanisms and a strong administrative state, though, and like Matt I don’t see any tension there. To whatever extent that you want the legislature to oversee, manage, and override the bureaucracy, why wouldn’t you want that legislature to be representative of the electorate? A minoritarian Senate is not less likely to try to hamstring the regulators.
You can agree or disagree about whether, in our system, the duly elected Congress should make laws and major political, versus unelected bureaucrats in the Executive Branch. But that's the debate, not who should control deployment of FBI staffing levels in a given city, which is so off-point that it almost seems like a bad faith deflection from what the debate is about.
I don't think it's bad faith at all, I think it's exactly correct. The issue here, I think, is that you disagree and therefore don't like the framing. But it does very much capture my view: the "bureaucratic" state -- also essentially the managerial state -- should have fairly wide discretion to execute its duties, with checks in place by a properly representative legislative branch (and of course a judicial branch).
Publicly owned corporations work this way, except the balance of power is massively in favor of the professional managerial staff. I don't think that the government should be run like a public corporation, but the basic notion that the executive branch should have reasonable discretion to performs its duties makes sense.
Framing can be done in good faith, but only when the framer understands and acknowledges the true objections of his audience. I doubt there is anyone who decries the administrative state as being out of control who has the FBI's personnel decisions in mind. The objection is actually for situations where the president's party cannot muster a majority in Congress to implement a policy, e.g., Congress wouldn't entertain a vaccine mandate law and so, hey, look: OSHA has had that authority all along!
Exactly
There is a difference between executing duties and making law. To use MY's FBI example, the FBI should not be deciding what is and is not a crime, and what sentences should be, what parole conditions are, etc. This may be an extreme example, but lawmaking, not just law enforcement, is what many other executive agencies do. Now, that is most likely because Congress gave up lawmaking power to that agency, and we can have that different argument if you want, but it still isn't consistent that many people who want to make it procedurally easier for Congress to make law also would rather have executive agencies make the law instead. This even applies to people currently in Congress. For example, Elizabeth Warren's proposed price-gouging law would grant I believe the FTC the authority to determine what price-gouging is, rather than, you know, Congress.
Yeah. Also, the one of the most countermajoritarian features of the Senate—the filibuster—directly makes it *harder* to control the administrative state by preventing Congress from passing legislation.
Matt dude I've been a subscriber since Day 1 but it's weird to me that you conceive of yourself as doing a "calmer" approach to politics when you're in Day 2 of a Twitter Beef with Perry Bacon Junior. The righteous pugilism of telling Dems they should deprioritize gun control the week after Uvalde is what I like about you, but it's not about being 'calmer or more rational'.
Slow Boring Matt and Twitter Matt often seem like two different people.
Two very different audiences.
Relatedly, I liked Bacon when he was with 538, but he’s since turned into Charles Blow so I very rarely read him.
I may be missing some context on the thread but Perry clearly called out Matt and Matt responded quite substantively and calmly. There may have been some snark but the relentless attacks on Matt and implications that he's a closet rightist must get very tiring.
it seems matt is either not capable of or not interested in grappling with the negative externalities of his social media usage. it's a very weird disconnect
"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.
On the question about Rene Girard- I’m currently reading “Wanting” by Luke Burgis and it’s on exactly this (Girard, mimetic desire, scapegoating, even an appearance from Thiel). Maybe this book is a symptom of the trend or it’s a cause, probably both. But it’s a good book and not at all “right wing” (or left wing) despite the Thiel references.
Burgis presents the concept of mimetic desire (basically, humans don’t tend to just want things on our own, we instinctively look around us for models to determine what we should want) as pretty earth-shattering, but to me it’s a somewhat obvious inference to make after reading “The Secret of our Success” and learning about the concept of cultural evolution. But I’m still enjoying the book, it’s a quick and easy read.
Burgis references Thiel and “Zero to One” fairly often, though always keeping him a bit at arms length and acknowledging he is controversial. He does not go full fan-boy for Thiel, just Girard. But apparently Thiel was a student of Girard’s.
Where are folks seeing it pop up in right wing circles? I’m curious. I learned about it through Chloe Valdary, who I follow for her anti-racism work but she herself is a big Jordan Peterson fan. But shes pretty heterodox generally. Given how much my brain was messed up by decades of critical race theory, Im permanently skeptical of falling too deep into a “this theory explains everything about the world” rabbit hole. But the basic claims seem uncontroversial enough. (Note that I’m only just at the point in the book where the author goes from “describing” to “proscribing,” which is where things often go off the rails.)
The Rosetta Stone for understanding the Silicon Valley Right and why they find Girard so congenial is elitism. There’s a small number of heroic creators who are responsible for progress and so maximizing their freedom of movement matters a ton, and the interests of everyone else don’t really matter.
Girard buttresses that by explaining that people’s interests aren’t even authentically theirs, they’ve just absorbed them from others nearby through a process that doesn’t have any connection to truth or virtue and therefore doesn’t have any moral weight. You see this in talk about “NPCs” who mindlessly latch onto “the Current Thing.” The thing that makes it all click together is the Thiels and Andreesens don’t think mimesis is about *them*. It’s Gerard For Other People.
The Silicon Valley Neo-feudalists are the *only* argument in favor of “billionaires are policy mistakes;” they turn that theory into a genuine theory of self-defense.
IDGAF how much genuine value someone created, if they’re Peter Thiel, I am completely ok with having their assets confiscated to the last nickel and then having them hanged.
Just like to note that "I'd like my political opponents to be robbed and killed" is a crazy view, and lowers the credibility of whatever else you might say. To about zero.
I agree with, uh, Evil Socrates.
I’m a normie liberal and I have serious process reservations about expropriating anyones wealth or executing them over their political views.
To both your and John’s comments:
To be clear, I’m not advocating the one-off extrajudicial punishment and execution of one person. I’d shed no tears if he were to die in an accident, anymore than a Russian serf would cry for a lord who fell from a horse. But Thiel isn’t the problem, just a manifestation of it.
The actual problem at hand… is that we now have the historical evidence to understand that vast concentrations of private wealth are *just* as dangerous to liberalism and democratic, pluralist governance as vast concentrations of government power, if not more so.
They positively breed radicalism *and* give individuals the power to exploit that opening to their own ends. Cultural restraint, broad-based support for democracy, and civic virtue are all insufficient constraints on elite behavior.
Aside from capitulating and accepting that republican governance will for many generations be little more than Populares vs Optimates, an unending cycle of proscription and counter-proscription, with the little people caught up in the gears of self-interested intra-elite competition, there are only two policy alternatives, to my mind.
First, and in my opinion more radical; we simply don’t allow concentrations of wealth to exist in excess of a certain amount. Not only does this by definition create a huge disincentive to investment and innovation, it also is extraordinarily difficult to legislate and enforce.
Which leads us to the second, and IMO only workable, option: rather than relying on the goodwill and self-restraint of those with enough money to develop their own armed forces, we codify a conception of treason and insurrection which prevents the extremely wealthy from translating their wealth into the power to threaten pluralist governance itself.
TL;DR: The things Peter Thiel and others do with their money must made illegal and punishable by the modern equivalent of proscription. It is the only way to keep them from undermining pluralist governance and turning the Republic (and every other democracy) into their personal playthings over the coming two generations.
Thiel is legitimately a threat to liberal democracy, but more for the persuasiveness of his ideas than for his money per se. He's a small fish dollar-wise relative to Musk, Bezos, Gates, or Buffet. But trying to fix that by greatly broadening the definition of treason is destroying the village to save it. Charges of disloyalty are a core part of the reactionary nationalist program, and they're always going to be more effective at using them than liberals are. We couldn't even make an impeachment stick on a lame-duck Trump when he fomented an insurrection on live television and his own party leaders would have been thrilled to have him disqualified by it from running again. For contrast, the W administration launched a secret international network of illegal torture prisons.
I think the only way to protect liberalism from the oligarchs is to have *effective* democratic government. You've got to keep tacking towards "people should generally get the government they want" and blowing up various inside games that develop, because they're always going to be better at inside games than we are over the long run. So nuke the filibuster, brush back aggressive judicial review, try to replace gerrymandered single-member-district legislatures with some kind of PR.
(This is why I'm such a fan of sortition-based methods)
Peter Thiel is spending hundreds of millions to try to turn me and 7-odd billion others into serfs and likely kill several hundred million of us (at minimum) in the doing. As was specifically pointed out above, he does not regard us as human.
I am merely returning the favor.
I am completely morally comfortable with advocating that he be executed by the state. In an even vaguely just world I would live long enough to see exactly that.
So cancel culture is out of control but it is still a good idea to endorse state execution of citizens for literal thought crimes. Gotcha.
Of which you are also apparently guilty by your own admission (assuming the crime is "not regarding people as human and advocating their death" anyway; maybe the crime is just "being someone David R doesn't like")!
If your definition of free speech encompasses “spending vast sums of money to overthrow democratic and republican governance everywhere and reduce humanity to slaves”, then more power to you, go seek Ted Cruz’s endorsement for a Supreme Court seat.
To me, that falls under the headline of treason, crimes against humanity, or both.
I believe he’s human… I just have no qualms enacting the death penalty on humans for such crimes.
Thiel is just so obviously weird and is like a stereotypical movie villain. Democrats need to do a better job of highlighting their worst/craziest opponents just like Republicans do with the “abolish the police” types, so the Thiels of the world become unwitting political assets instead of threats to democracy
"...explaining that people’s interests aren’t even authentically theirs..."
Sounds like warmed-over "false consciousness."
... or Thorsten Veblen
Like mimesis, “horseshoe theory” describes something real, even if it doesn’t explain everything. :)
I definitely think that people can have interests that aren’t authentically their own. People who buy into scams are a clear example. Ironically, a major vector of scams is the current web3 fiasco from the tech industry, with the shitcoin cryptocurrencies and NFT rug pulls.
So it's for people that haven't grown out of their Ayn Rand Phase yet?
I read that book while still a libertarian in my early 20s, and the immorality and contempt for the poor was eye opening as someone who had tried to talk myself into conservatism being good for society as a whole and not just for rich people. I credit Rand for making me a liberal, honestly (albeit a neoliberal since I still think markets work)
Yep. Rand is up front about her “heroic conception of Man” or some such.
Thanks, this was really helpful.
I came across this podcast interview with Burgis, would be a quick way to get the gist without investing in the whole book: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/where-we-go-next/id1527944755?i=1000563953933
Thanks!
Though in response to the questions in the episode description: "Have you ever wondered why the decisions you make keep leaving you unfulfilled? How you'll doggedly pursue something - a career, a relationship, some Big Life Goal - and once you've finally got it, you find yourself underwhelmed?"
Nope! I'm right where I want to be and feel quite fulfilled in my career, relationships, and at achieving my life goal.
I think you may have tapped in to why this appeals to Silicon Valley tech bros like a pseudo-religion while just being mildly interesting to the rest of us.
I am not remotely connected to this world so I can’t make any statements about the weird way this concept is being discussed/applied. But the basic claim that “most of us want what the people around us want, or actively reject what the people around us want” seems straightforward and pretty true. And yeah the virality of the concept itself would seem like a point in its own favor. For whatever it’s worth, Burgis certainly admits it applies to him and claims Thiel does too. (I know Thiel is a “bad guy” and I find him vaguely creepy but I don’t know much about him at all outside of what I’ve read about the “new right”/gray mirror crap.)
Yeah it’s not like there’s nothing to it; the idea of mimetic desire (and the idea of scapegoating) definitely describes a real thing that happens. Seeing that potential in Facebook in 2004 was a huge insight! The question is how central you should make that to your understanding or the world and your moral framework.
I am morbidly curious how “the scapegoat mechanism” might be working its way into nutty right-wing conversations.
From what I've seen it's basically a call for a return to pre-modern violence against a communal target so as to allow for society to function smoothly and all of modernity's problems are because we can't be scapegoat-violet so we just do more generally violent stuff. Or something. I'm only recently even aware of the whole line of thinking so it's not something I really understand.
Oh good lord... smart people can be so stupid sometimes.
As a blanket delegitimization of criticism. In Gerard, the Scapegoat role is filled without regard for guilt or innocence. So the move is to hop from “I am being blamed for this independent of the role I played in causing it” to “I played no role in causing it.”
Have any reading recommendations? I'd like to know more. Call it a morbid curiosity.
I first encountered Girard when I went to work at Thiel’s hedge fund in 2008. Pretty sure I just started with the Wikipedia description of his writing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Girard
Characterizations of how Girard influences SV right wingers are my own, based on their public statements. Haven’t discussed that interpretation with any of the principals.
Yikes.
mimetic desire... first time I've ever read that phrase. Seems to me though it explains or is related to so many things.
1. peer pressure
2. people preferring to be richest person in neighborhood then being an even rich person in an even richer neighborhood.
3. Gang/crime culture where people emulate local criminals.
Burgis, Thiel and Girard each use no restraint in claiming "mimetic desire" is a sweeping "theory of everything." So yes, covers all those and more! Burgis is a product of Silicon Valley himself, so a lot of his examples are related to the way people there get caught up in the rat race. He even tells stories of (possibly) contagious suicide in the Tony Hsieh "Downtown Project."
Always wanted a fancy watch. So thankful my wife bought me one, wear it every day with pride. A little disappointed it is not considered remotely fancy by watch people, but I’m ok with it I guess I’m doing my best to succumb to mimetic impulses? Also would trade in any of the super fancy watches folks have for that one my dad bought me in high school that I left in a bathroom. Maybe the antidote to mimetic values is sappy sentimentalism?
Girard would probably say the reason you desire the watch is that you’re mimicking your father and the perception that he liked the watch he gave you? Who knows!
Thiel, obviously, is one of the people who promotes this ideology but I also see it commonly referenced by people like Tyler Cowen (not himself a totally right-wing person!), various VCs (Jonathan Bi being a recent example), and is talked about on techie forums, podcasts, etc. Also mentioned by the dark enlightenment types. Like I said, it's not "the ideology of silicon valley" as some might suggest but I feel like I am seeing it appear with more frequency.
Gotcha. Check out the book, it’s not brainwashing or anything, best I can tell. I can see where it could be used to justify nefarious rabbit holes though, just as Darwin’s theory of evolution was used to justify eugenics. I don’t think it’s inherently immoral or amoral though.
Does the book do a good job of justifying the various parts of these theories? Is there, like, *evidence* for these claims about scapegoats and mimesis? What data supports the position that all human beings everywhere on the planet only desire things because they see other people desiring them? Did Girard do a survey?
Or scapegoating! Did pre-modern societies actually operate on this principle? Looking at, say, Hammurabi's code, it does not appear scapegoating is a meaningful part of how his justice operated. Is referencing the old testament really a universal claim to the origins of human society? I thought we moved beyond that.
This is why the whole french theory thing gets a bit out of hand to me. There's this tendency to make sweeping generalizations about the nature of the human mind and the functioning of past societies but never a solid attempt to mark these beliefs to the real world.
Not that you have to answer these questions just what that pops into my mind whenever I read about this stuff.
Absolutely fair questions and the general answer is no, the book does not do any data-crunching or show any broad studies to support these claims. Just anecdotes and historical examples. Not to say there aren't lots of studies that *could* support these claims- the Asch conformity study comes to mind, as one. But I think you're right that this runs the same risk as all the other "theories" where they claim to be so self-obviously true that they skip over the part where they test their claims, even when those claims go from narrow/trivial ones that maybe don't need to be tested, to sweeping/prescriptive/tyrannical.
"The Secret of Our Success" is far more academic/rigorous, and not actually about Girard or mimesis, but I think does a better job of laying out a unified theory of why humans copy each other (to create, test, improve upon, and pass along cultures).
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."
Huh, I'm in the exact opposite camp regarding authors reading their own works; I look on it as a red flag and rarely get those audiobooks. My sense is that "writing a good book" and "reading a book aloud well" are two completely different skillsets that don't necessarily overlap and, in fact, rarely do. Is this just a silly bias on my part?
I agree that the two skillsets don't necessarily have any bearing in each other, but rather than using it as a red flag I'd just read the reviews. If they read it well, great, if not then I'd skip it.
This is a general principle I think people fall victim to too often. In this case the OP wants to say author reading means it's good and you want to say the opposite.
I say, instead of having some set of rules, you can just...check.
Someone just liked this comment of mine and the email about that made me recognize that I wrote "skillets" instead of "skillsets"!
If Celtics win in 5 Matty should buy Milan a pizza
Celtics winning game 1 is a big win for stats nerds shape rotators over "playoffs experience" narrative believing wordcels
Last night made me think Milan was onto something
I would like to argue a step beyond "hypocrisy is weak tea" and say that *for most people*, hypocrisy is the only morally acceptable way to live your life.
To attempt to justify this claim, and at the risk of being extremely weird, I will explain my reasoning not in prose but in a dialogue excerpt from a play I wrote (never yet produced and frankly not ready to be produced):
__________________
SAUL
What are the alternatives?
(He takes three shrimp from the rabbi's plate and lays them side by side, on the table.)
There are three kinds of people in the world, and only three: saints, villains, and hypocrites. Right?
ZEV
I don't know that I agree but you can go on.
SAUL
Well who else is there?
ZEV
Whatever, say I concede, what's your point?
SAUL
(Pointing to the shrimp)
Saints, villains, hypocrites. Well, sainthood is in very short supply. It's out of reach for most of us.
(SAUL puts one shrimp back on the plate.)
ZEV
Yes.
SAUL
So if you find yourself imperfect and unable to always live up to your own standards, you have two choices: either keep telling the moral truth as you see it and accept that you will be seen correctly as a hypocrite, or else lower your standards to meet your weaknesses, i.e., undermine your principles just to avoid being a hypocrite. And what could be more self-centered than that? In fact, doing that makes you a villain. And you don't want to be a villain.
(He puts one more shrimp back on the plate.)
Once you realize you're not perfect, hypocrisy is the only moral choice.
ZEV
Okay. As a result, okay. But not as a mission, not as your North Star.
SAUL
Whatever. The point is, what you're doing is important.
ZEV
How is it important? Everyone else is a hypocrite too.
SAUL
But you admit the hypocrisy! That's no small thing!
ZEV
Admitting it doesn't make it okay.
SAUL
But not admitting it would make it worse. It's like— There are two kinds of hypocrite. Two levels. You're a hypocrite because you preach one thing and do another.
ZEV
Yeah, that's what it means.
SAUL
But there's a step beyond that. The worse kind of hypocrite—the kind most people are!—preaches one thing, does another thing, and at the same time he swears up and down that he lives by what he preaches. He's a hypocrite who also pretends to be a saint!
ZEV
Okay.
SAUL
So what we should do, what we have to do, is be the good kind of hypocrite. The humble kind. Right? Be the honest hypocrite. Honestly preach a vision of morality, and even when you fail to live up to it, which is often, honestly be willing to say so publicly. That's what you do. I see you doing it!
ZEV
Yes.
SAUL
And that's what I want to do! That's what I've been searching for, for the past eight years of feeling torn in half between two worlds!
(He picks up the remaining piece of shrimp.)
Shrimp is not kosher! Jews should not eat shrimp! Ritual law trains our self-control and binds us together as a people and gives our lives meaning! Eating kosher makes our deepest philosophy and our shared history and our shared future all into something that's real in our bodies! Jewish law is not optional and it is not part-time! For a Jew to eat shrimp is to reject his heritage, attack his integrity, and uproot his soul!
(He eats the piece of shrimp.)
Shrimp is delicious! And the rest of it is all still true!
Up early again here in Mountain Time. So one of my lists.
1. Irony.... Matt says if he were boss he would build all the housing and clear all the homeless, but then a few paragraphs later says the evidence for focused deterrence is poor. Clearing homeless but providing housing/treatment is the definition of focused deterrence. It's the real reason why Europe has few homeless but laxer drug laws.
B. The whole gun thing and length of sentencing is so clearly wrong. Long sentences don't deter crime is one of those things that gets repeated ad nauseum but without evidence. When you start studying, the sentences go like.... long sentences hardly reduce crime... as in they do reduce crime, but not enough to justify the authors progressive sensibilities.
And whenever they talk about his subject, its always about deterrence. That's because like Matt said, deterrence is more about catching and punishing more people.
What they never talk about is incapacitation. The fact is that keeping hardcore high prevalent criminals in jail for a long time until they age out does reduce crime, and combined with a high catch rate, it works well.
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/incapacitation-how-much-does-putting-people-inside-prison-cut-crime-outside
3a. I love Matt, well I love all humans, but I really enjoy his work, but the spoken word is not his forte. His reading voice (I sampled One Billion Americans) wasn't the best. Though at least the audiobook isn't filled with fillers like "like" ... listen to Matts podcasts.
d. Questions for Milan: How was Amsterdam? I know it's famous for weed (and I know you smoke), but the bar scene was always my favorite. I could ask if you tried the red lights but I don't expect an answer. I will confess that when I lived in Holland as a young single man, I hit them occasionally. (Don't judge me people). I do miss the Netherlands.
e. I completely agree about hypocrisy being overrated. I am hypocritical about 1000 things. All we can do is acknowledge and move on.
Different subject: I just bought an RV to live in while I remodel my cabin which I bought to replace an RV I sold. I'm a total buy high sell low guy. Heading to the Cabin in Granite, Oregon this weekend.
Related Subject: We are getting so much rain in the North West lately. Hopefully it means an easy fire season.
Have a great day!
Amsterdam was a blast!
"When you start studying, the sentences go like.... long sentences hardly reduce crime... as in they do reduce crime, but not enough to justify the authors progressive sensibilities."
No. Each year added to a person's sentence is another year the government needs to hire prison guards to watch him, buy food to feed him, buy clothes to clothe him, and forgo any income taxes he might pay on his job outside of prison. The point is that long sentences reduce crime less than the corresponding amount of money getting spent on police (or social services).
When you take all prisoners yes. If you did a cost analysis of the chronic criminals then the maths flips. Gun possession crimes. Robbery in possession. Brandishing a weapon. Shooting someone.
"We are getting so much rain in the North West lately. Hopefully it means an easy fire season."
But it can also mean more fuel is grown for fires if the summer gets exceptionally dry. *Debbie Downer horn*
To end this on a high note, enjoy the cabin this weekend!
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."
I feel Matt is soft peddling some of the more effective, ugly aspects of ‘tough on crime’ policing.
Four young men are found in a car containing an illegal handgun. Everyone in the car could face a 10 year sentence or a 1 year sentence with a bail requirement they are unlikely to be able to meet. Or they can be released without bail to face any charge again from 1 year to 10. The difference in the bail req is much more impactful than the sentence pursued. It’s effect is much more immediate and that is both the deterrence and incapacitation that primarily matters, not what punishment they might face in 18 months after trial.
We have a procedural understanding of justice that unfortunately does not line up with actual crime control very well. And it lines up with ‘public order’ even worse.
Far better than bail reform would be a process for adjudicating quickly! Our legal system has a wide range of powers, rights, and responsibilities based on argumentation and essentially divorced from the reality of actually processing cases through a courtroom.
My additional concern here is generally in regards to how enforcement actually works. Tough on crime and cracking down on guns nearly universally means aggressively harassing a ton of poor people. It would be one thing if the discussion was about coupling stronger enforcement with community investment, ending the drug war, reforming bail, funding public defenders appropriately, holding politicians/police/authority figures accountable for corruption, collaborating with neighborhoods for improvements, and building relationships between people and police. But it isn't. We are back to the 90's where everyone is talking about heavy handed policing. There is no reason to believe this goes any differently.
I expect nobody that can afford a subscription here currently faces the sorts of harassment poor people get from police. If anyone has experienced it in the past, you will know what I mean. It is awful to be constantly run down by people in uniform, looked down upon for stupid shit like busted tail lights that you can't afford to deal with and then spending hours waiting in cuffs while police literally tear your car to pieces looking for guns you don't have. They don't fix it, they don't apologize, they don't care. It destroys your life, it destroys your children's lives, it destroys communities, and it perpetuates violence.
I tend to think we could build out surveillance in the style of London metro and do less direct contact. This has its own trade offs.
And of course people are free to say they like the tradeoff of a government they can trust not to harass them over a government they trust to keep guns off the street.
All I mean to say is, if police stop someone and they have an illegal gun and then put that person immediately in jail that has a strong effect. It doesn’t have to be forever.
On the other hand the cops can make just as many stops, piss off just as many citizens, find the same guy with gun and issue him a summons to appear in court at some point which, after he skips, a bench warrant will be issued and then lost because the warrants division had a ton of brutality claims against it (they aways do) and has been disbanded……. Well it just doesn’t move the needle as much on gun crime even if it’s seems closer to our ideal of procedural justice to some.
I think they were doing something like this in Chicago and I think it was sort of working. But their department has big problems and if I remember correctly businesses stopped cooperating with Chicago PD as a result.
You seem to think that interactions between the police and the poor people are universally the same across the very many cities and states and police departments of this country.
Not every department has a 100% adversarial relationship with the community they serve, even in poor neighborhoods. Not every poor neighborhood even has a big problem with gun crime.
You are absolutely right that it isn't universal. It isn't my intention to blame all police departments. But good relationships between police and community at least appear rare and in practice actual people don't really differentiate between one department and the next. Which isn't bad general practice given how really bad actors just jump from department to department.
How would you know how rare good relations are? If I read the NYTs they appear rare. If I go by life experience they seem fairly common.
Same goes for bad actors jumping from dept to dept. It would be really nice to see actual data. Instead I almost exclusively see anecdotes, and those are almost devoid of larger context (why do bad police get rehired - what's the incentives?) and entirely ignore the examples where police are screened and / or fired, which happens quite a bit from what I've read.
Yes, I'm don't face harassment the way many poor people seem to be harassed by police.
But I'm _ALSO_ not worried about living in a neighborhood with a high crime rate and a lot of gun violence - the sort of thing which ALSO destroys your life, children's lives, communities, and perpetuates violence.
There can be good and bad versions of more aggressive crackdown policies (stop-and-frisk seems like a pretty bad one) but since it comes with both consequences AND benefits, it's worth considering where we want to be on the tradeoff and how we can maximize upsides vs. downsides.
(Edit: Changed first sentence to clarify what I meant - sounded originally like I wasn't worried that people are being harassed, I meant that I'm not currently facing it myself) (Edited the edit: Added a 'not') (Is that enough edits? :fingers crossed:)
I certainly agree with you there. I am confident there is a good way to do this. I am not convinced we are capable of doing those things in the current environment and in practice good approaches appear to be rare to nonexistent. Dropping the hammer is dropping the hammer.
Sounds like U are ok with the one guy getting in trouble for the gun crime just not the ten on criminals getting harassed to get the one...I agree with that. Some of this is increasing police professionalism. Gun crimes and crime and punishment in this country is complicated. I think just acknowledging that is what people don’t want to do a lot of the time.
Long sentences an area where I blame broken courts. These are used as a tool to intimidate folks into plea bargains, all to obscure that US lawyers have settled on an understanding of procedural justice such that courts actually cannot process most of the cases we need to bring. And the costs tend to out weight the benefits when we do actually go to trial.
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).