The case against municipal fragmentation

Plus, the truth about wage stagnation

A quick bit of housekeeping before today’s column: This reader column was originally scheduled to run last Friday, but we rescheduled following the debate.

This week, we’re traveling to Portugal, and between that and the 4th of July, Slow Boring will operate at a slightly slower pace for the week. Don’t worry, we have great content lined up, including some of the results from the reader survey, a piece from Ben looking at the complicated history of osteopathic medicine, and an old fashioned mailbag. Plus tomorrow, July 2, I’ll be doing a chat for paid subscribers at 3pm Eastern.

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My big recommended reading this week is the Economic Innovation Group’s report “The American Worker: Toward a New Consensus.” There’s a lot of nuance and back and forth in it, but I think this chart is the most importance piece. It makes the point that the problem of “wage stagnation” is something that we mostly left in the past a long time ago.

The question of why, exactly, real wage outcomes were so dismal in the 1972-1993 era is very interesting. It probably has to do with oil shocks, with the difficult fight against inflation, with the massive entry of women into the labor force, and maybe something to do with the sheer size of the Baby Boom cohort. But it can’t be the case that NAFTA, trade with China, and “neoliberalism” are to blame, because it happened before that stuff!

Some other recommendations:

• Nicole Narea on life after Roe.

• Tim Lee’s doubts about AI explosion.

• Mercatus’ look at land use in Northern Virginia.

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Good news this week: We’re saving lives with “unusable” kidneys, the first big commercial contract for geothermal energy was awarded, and people are feeling fewer negative emotions.

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Comment of the week from JCW, on elite misinformation: I wrote a book adjacent to this topic, Radiation Evangelists, about the early development years of radiation therapy in medicine, and I have an add-on to this column: a lot of times people doing this kind of misinformation have functionally managed to talk themselves into believing what they are pitching.

Most of the early radiation innovators that I wrote about ended up dying of cancer or other radiation-induced maladies. I expected the story to be one where people who didn't know better died of something they didn't understand. But what I found in the research is that users recognized--and documented!--the risks more or less immediately. It's just that they then proceeded to talk themselves into alternate explanations. A lot of patients were harmed as a result, but the therapists bore the worst of it; more or less an entire generation of men and women who were enthusiastic early adopters ended up dead in a pretty painful and awful way.

All of which is simply to say that I think "elite misinformation" is an even harder problem than this column suggests, because motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug. Even well-meaning humans armed with reasonable information are highly prone to talk themselves into believing wrong stuff, and they will do that EVEN WITH the counter information right there in on the table. And someone who has lied to themself first is hard to disabuse of a notion, because 1) they do not "know" that they are lying, and 2) admitting that they are wrong now carries a component of shame and disappointment to go along with the embarrassment.

It's just a really hard problem.

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Our question this week is from Drew Kudlow: Almost every American metropolitan area has dozens of separate municipal governments, a couple county governments, and a ton of school districts, parks districts, water districts, etc.

Is this degree of municipal fragmentation a problem? New York City is less fragmented than say, Los Angeles or the Bay Area, and NYC seems generally more capable when it comes to addressing big challenges. Should reformers try to push for more consolidated cities?

This is a complicated question to address, because there is a multiplicity of fragmentations. One is that sometimes the geographical units of government are very small, either in area or in population or in both. Another is that sometimes governing authority is very fragmented. If you live in Ingram, TX, for example, some of your local government functions are performed by the City of Ingram, others by Kerr County, others by Ingram ISD, etc.

I think that there’s really just one problem with spatial fragmentation, though it’s a serious one: The more fragmented your geography, the more likely you are to undersupply housing.

The fragmentation of governing authority, by contrast, seems very bad to me, because it makes it much too hard for citizens (and the media) to actually track who is responsible for what.