Big city mayors ought to be the shock troops of efficiency. The incentives are right. Ordinary mayors have little chance of becoming governor, much less President. But someone who made NYC or Chicago work again might unite city dwellers and corporate republicans and have a punchers chance at higher office.
The broader question is why do so few successful politicians take risks? Why aren’t a couple Republican senators arguing for taxing the rich and a couple Democratic governors experimenting with second trimester abortion restrictions and abundant energy? The existence of a vital center depends upon goring the sacred cows of the parties, and the only people willing to do that seem to be commenters and talk radio hosts.
This is why I miss Mike Bloomberg. He may not have always been right, but he was not beholden to teachers or cops or municipal workers or developers and tried to make the best decisions. We all need altruistic billionaires with no natural constituency to govern. The problem is most billionaires with an interest in politics are like Peter Thiel or Sheldon Adelson.
Really? I'm not a zoning lawyer, but my experience of living in Brooklyn for forty years is Bloomberg hugely up-zoned the borough and the results have been dramatic. If he felt 'beholden to some narrow, self-interested constituencies', it was developers and the Yimby whiners on this site who've made it nearly unreadable. Please give us more of the rent is too damn high and how a billion Americans is the solution.
This is interesting, but I doubt whatever Bloomberg did in Ozone Park or Richmond Hills to let whatever ethnic group enjoy their little enclave and provide votes to Bloomberg outweighed the massive up-zoning elsewhere.
Why are our politicians such fucking cowards has been a personal hobbyhorse of mine for a long time. The vacuum of true leadership is this country is really stark. Matt should write about this
I would argue they're not cowards. They're just maximally self-serving, and on average evince a more intense desire to hold onto office than did the American political leaders of previous decisions. Part of this dynamic includes an increase in the shrewdness with which they avoid putting themselves in a vulnerable position.
I think the important question is: why are so many people in politics so utterly desperate to hold onto their jobs (even at the price of complete rejection of the national interest)?
Are they more desperate? A quick google search suggests that on average 10%+ of reps retire every 2 years - not including those defeated. Given how irrelevant leadership has made most back benchers, I'm surprised its not higher, but that still seems a pretty regular turn over.
I believe so, yes. They key is: get enough seniority to monetize your experience and Roledex (or national brand) in a serious way upon leaving office. Riches await you. And, yes, that steady stream of "leavers" is what that looks like.
But you have to put in your time on Capitol Hill (or Albany, or Sacramento, or Beacon Hill) to acquite that clout. And that means serving mutliple terms.
Weren’t representatives of past generations, on average, poorer than todays crop? Wouldn’t desperation have decreased? Ambition may have increased, greed may have increased, competition may have increased, but I don’t think desperation has
Desperation might be a bad word choice on my part. But that I simply meant "really, really, REALLY wants to avoid losing the job of being an elected lawmaker."
And yes, a lot of this is greed-driven in my view. Living the good life in America (big house in fancy suburb, pied-a-terre in DC or Manhattan, beach condo, private schools, top end accommodations and vacations destinations. seasons tickets, high end dining) isn't cheap. Generating the kind of income required to live such a life can be had, though, I'm pretty sure, for a former government official with sufficient clout or connections or name recognition. And that, in turn requires reaching a level of stature conferred by serving multiple terms. And before leaving government and cashing in, the increasing clout and influence of members of Congress with growing seniority immeasurably helps the congressional spouse's earning power, according to everything I've read.
(Members of Congress also receive retirement benefits linked to how long they've served, so that's also a pretty direct inducement to avoid losing an election.)
My suspicion is that actions in congress carry outside of it much more than they did in the past. Being a good foot soldier in congress opens doors after you leave that being risky would not.
Because voters are fickle and have a short memory, for the most part. I'm with you, for the record. I'm a big fan of the idea of a politician running on one specific policy goal, accomplishing that thing, and then not running again. Is your thing campaign reform? Is that something the public is clamoring for? Cool, run on a platform of enacting that and then getting the hell out of the way for the next person...I think voters could go for something like that as opposed to someone running to be everything to everybody.
Lawrence Lessig did run on this exact platform in 2016 and it made him a bit of a laughing stock. I don't know if this is a problem of the media latching onto a certain narrative, the fact he was running a Yang style presidential bid with no credentials, or that people actually are turned off by these narrow platforms, but it doesn't bode super well for similar attempts.
I think it's because politicians are accountable to voters... and voters want different (often competing or conflicting) things! It's not that they are afraid to lose, it's that they were elected by a constituency that wants whatever they want -- and what they want is not contracting efficiency, it's usually stuff like free parking, and abatement for rats, trash, and crime. It's *very* hard to make progress on big, meaty problems in one term even if you aren't planning on re-running. I think underrated cause of success for Bloomberg is had three terms (12 years!!) to tackle big issues, plus he had a huge group of policy wonks who'd already been working on his issues (from Bloomberg Philanthropies) to hit the ground running as heads of various agencies. He was also just a spectacularly good manager.
It doesn't seem to me like politicians are optimizing for doing what voters actually want either. They always seem to be avoiding doing unpopular things or taking unpopular stances. But maybe to your point, "doing things" is somewhat unpopular, so the optimal strategy to just to not do things.
The problems with this are a) many goals require more than one term to fulfill, and b) most elected offices require more than one person to be elected and united toward the goal in question.
Occam's razor; people at their core are risk adverse and to that end your median voter has enormous "status quo" bias. At the end of the day, there's just tremendous incentive for politicians to just not "rock the boat". There's a reason someone like Charlie Baker in MA might be the most popular politician in America.
It actually fits in with Matt's (I think correct) insistence that an underrated reason Trump won was that he took health care and social security off the table as issues for Dems to run on in 2016 (he was obviously lying as evidenced by GOP trying to overturn ACA. We forget that Rand Paul of all people, helped barely save it. But it seems pretty clear in retrospect that repealing ACA would have been politically terrible for GOP). And it's also why the Dobbs decision is giving Democrats tail winds in this year's midterms.
Reality is, for all of Trump's awfulness, for the median voter he didn't actually change much and in fact the economy boomed (given how much unwarranted credit is given to any President for what passes Congress, it seems likely to me at least some median voters credited Trump for stimulus checks and enhanced UI).
Basically, it pays politically not to do anything.
I too would enjoy a post on this. However I think the answer will be “it has always been such, because that’s how the system is designed.” There is a reason all our “greatest” presidents after the founding generation have emerged only in times of tremendous national crisis. The people are supposed to lead, and put functionaries in office to execute popular preferences.
For my northern virginia people on here, I see this so starkly in Arlington's missing middle study. These cowards are going to have studied the issue for two years and are going to cave to the NIMBYs and approve no changes whatsoever.
The massive disinvestment of the suburban flight period really did utterly fuck over urban politics.
It used to be that both machine and reformers were focused on accomplishing shit, albeit in very different ways, with different goals, and different levels of outright corruption.
But the way for the machine to maintain power was to dole out public goods to the neighborhoods and demographics which backed it, and their conception of how to do that was to build parks, mass transit, better school buildings, shit that improved quality of life, and to run the schools and hospitals and public health organizations well.
Sure, there were kickbacks and corruption out the wazoo, and lots of jobs were handed out on factors other than merit, but the net effects were smaller than the insane dysfunctions of the current model.
Then the 60's-80's came and destroyed that model. Populations fell, tax base shattered, and city governments were consumed by an all-encompassing focus on doling out the bare bones of patronage to the poor masses that voted them in. And that's what they've been ever since.
There's just no ambition to be found to start with, and now the woke/hipster school of politics has put brainworms in a bunch of the rich-ish folks moving back to the cities that basically lead them to say "improving services, enforcing the law, and building public goods is bad because it leads to gentrification and disproportionate impacts to poor people" instead of "let's build/provide enough of everything for everyone to enjoy, including poor folks."
I don't have a clue how to revamp governance in urban areas, but shooting and burying the mid- and post-disinvestment patronage model is a necessary first step.
> improving services, enforcing the law, and building public goods is bad because it leads to gentrification and disproportionate impacts to poor people
This is an interesting comment but I don't agree with this part of the analysis. Lots of people say things like that on twitter, but that sentiment is not the reason local governance is failing. When I attend local NYC community boards, they might pay lip service to gentrification or whatever, but that's not the real problem. The real problem is people are just fundamentally afraid of change. I'm continually astounded by how *conservative* the old white democrats who run things are. They wouldn't want a new park doled out by their city council member, because that might involve construction or a local business being impacted or they like to park their car in that empty lot. How do you fix constituents who truly don't want anything to get better?
I don't blame the hipster leftists for it, but that school of politics took a constituency which is, basically everywhere else in the world and throughout history, a force for "unfuck this stuff", and turned it into one that's onboard with a status quo of decay and horror for a lot of people.
That said, I don't disagree with your statement above either, and I assure you that old black Democrats are very much identical. Philadelphia is a major force for continuing to run SEPTA as a patronage gig instead of using that money to improve mobility and access to opportunity for the poor, and the reality is that the poor in a lot of places just don't care or don't believe it possible to make fundamental improvements, so long as the city is keeping them from being evicted from their hellhole rental and they can cobble together enough to make ends meet with some crap part-time work and various assistance programs.
This isn't a condemnation of them, it's just to point out that all of this exists downstream of a period in which these cities really did just fall apart. "Hold what I got" is the only important driver in urban politics, whether it's a patronage job that might be made redundant, a shitty rental that might get bought and renovated, an abandoned lot for parking, or a once-an-hour bus service that runs on your block.
There's no constituency for prising these meager benefits away from everyone and enacting fundamental reforms that will replace them with something better because virtually no one believes that the latter half is ever coming.
Frankly, we'll have to gentrify the cities to the point where the poor can't even live in them under the status quo before they'll get on board with reforms. And even then, NYC and San Francisco are only marginally further along that curve than Philly.
You exemplified the problem in your own phrasing. Prying away benefits from people who regularly use and depend on them always comes before the development of a better system.
What? We're not talking about actual social welfare benefits, we're talking about a bunch of random inefficiencies that are doled out unfairly through informal channels and make it impossible for urban governments to provide real benefits and in many instances even basic services.
The police precinct that always assigns a car to park on one commercial stretch and blow off nearby ones and has since 1975.
The folks who turn permitting and construction safety inspections into a game of political connections.
The bus routes that meander to and fro trying to make it so no one ever has to walk two blocks to catch the bus at the expense of it taking two hours for working parents to commute.
The housing authority that doles out land to friendly faces or ineffectual non-profits which never build houses.
The piles of make-work and above-market wages paid to those who do it at the expense of service provision.
The caving to the teachers' and police unions at every turn on accountability and hiring/firing issues.
The unending streams of money spent on pilot projects, planning consultants, feasibility studies, instead of building shit that's needed and letting people get used to it.
The increasingly complex and restrictive zoning overlays, to the point where we can barely even replace housing at 1:1, let alone build anything new.
All of it is part and parcel of the "hunker down" mentality that dominates urban politics.
This has fuck-all to do with social democracy or the welfare state, it's all about the protection of informal, inefficient, but expected "benefits" doled out by city governments decades ago. It's *strangling* us.
It's not that politicians are asking people to give up formal social benefits in exchange for better ones that may never materialize. Tt's that when they moot plans to change *anything,* the 1,500 people who benefit from the status quo turn up to bitch and the 1.5 million who could be slightly better off don't believe it'll work or don't care. And of course, the spineless idiot politicians hold hearings and commission studies and then listen to the dozen people in front of them instead of just *doing* whatever it is because it worked in fifty other places and people will like it once it's in place.
The 1500 vs 1.5m argument is weak sauce. It’s the same argument used time and time again in the US to justify atrocities like bulldozing black neighborhoods for the interstates and burying the bodies of Asian laborers under our train lines.
That is an interesting insight that the ones who should be pushing hardest for change are in some cases pushing in the wrong direction.
I wasn't suggesting the old black democrats are different, I just have seen exactly one black community board member in the two CBs where I've attended meetings :/.
I superlike (c) this comment. Living in NYC, I always wonder why, with such a large pool of potential candidates, we have such generally mediocre-to-terrible politicians. But this is also largely true of politicians almost everywhere.
There are a lot of problems right now! It seems like some people other than commenters and talk radio hosts should want to wrestle with them. I’m not sure whether there’s an incentive problem such that only people seeking performance platforms run for office or whether it’s always been pretty bad and we just get lucky occasionally when a serious competent person runs and wins.
The problem with NYC candidates specifically is ballot access. Unless one is a good-standing member of the Democratic Party it is incredibly difficult to get on the ballot.
Trump had pretty awful substance for a politician, but the guy took a lot of risks... the record of them paying off is mixed (winning the Republican primary is probably the most unlikely achievement, beating Hillary less so, and losing to Biden should be seen as a huge failure) but he did re-make the Republican Party in his image.
In politics and government generally there is a huge problem with people never wanting to be the first to try something. The pay-off can be huge though, and for people with other options should they lose an election, in my view it makes sense to take some risks. Does anyone go into public life hoping to make no change?
My suggestion is for MY to lead a campaign to “fix” Union Station, a place I incidentally visit about once a month on a trip from out of town. Let’s have a series of articles on the ins and outs of “getting stuff done” and then draw some fact based conclusions.
Your point about the construction cost overruns killing the chance of construction projects reminds of a joke a Nigerian told me years ago.
A Nigerian and an Indonesian are finishing college in the US together. They have been both been sponsored by their governments and are about to return to their jobs as civil servants
"If you ever come to Indonesia, call me and we can hang out!" says the Indonesian official.
"Really? Cool! Same to you. If you ever come to Nigeria, call me and we can hang out!" says the Nigerian official.
4 years later, the Nigerian comes to Indonesia, remembering about his Indonesian official and decides to call him.
"Hey, I'm coming to Indonesia, want to hang out?" he asks.
"Sure! Just a question, where are you staying?" the Indonesian official asks.
"The Hilton." the Nigerian replies.
"Nah, meet me at the airport. You can live with me for your trip."
"Sounds good."
The Indonesian official pulls up to the airport with a BMW, the latest model. The Nigerian gets in and the Indonesian official takes him on the freeway to his condo. On the freeway, the Nigerian admires the beautiful scenery. Once at the condominium, the Nigerian is impressed at how big the condo is: 5 rooms, 3 bathrooms, and much more that he was baffled about. There's a 2nd BMW parked outside.
The Nigerian official goes to the master bedroom and asks
"You are just a humble official, how do you have enough?"
The Indonesian official tells him to come to the window and asks, "What do you see outside?"
"Houses, apartments, and people."
"You see that freeway?” Rubs finger and thumb together. "I took 10%".
“Aha” winks the Nigerian. “Say no more”
Fast forward 3 months when the Indonesian official comes to Nigeria to return the visit. He arranges to meet his friend at the airport. The Nigerian official pulls up to the airport in a Lamborghini. The Indonesian official gets in and the Nigerian takes him. The Indonesian official is really excited, wanting to see the beautiful place Nigeria is. They drive and drive when suddenly the road turns into a muddy unpaved road going into the bush. Huts and children running around. The Indonesian official is shocked until they get to the Nigerian's place: a mansion in a beautiful clearing. The mansion is gorgeous, 35 bedrooms, completed with a slide to the pool from the 2nd floor to the 1st. Two Rolls Royces are parked outside
The Indonesian official goes to the master bedroom and checks the toilet, in disbelief. The toilet seat is pure gold.He then asks,
"You are just a humble official, how do you have enough?"
The Nigerian official tells him to come to the window, points at the jungle and asks,
A large chunk of this post is about what's known as the "curb cut effect" - a lot of the time, when you design for people with disabilities, you make things better for everyone (or, at least, for an awful lot of other people without disabilities).
Level boarding, elevator access, curb cuts - also things like closed captions (very popular, especially with the currently fashionable mushy sound on TV and film) - all of these benefit a lot of users who aren't in any normal sense disabled. Audiobooks used to be something that existed only for a small number of blind readers: now we have a cheap distribution system and they are popular with all sorts of people.
The communication and teaching strategies required to teach neurodiverse kids are just good practice and would benefit anybody. My kid is neurodiverse (slight ASD, heavy ADHD) and I've completely changed my parenting approach. It's helped me take care of other kids with ease and even translated into better, more constructive relationships at work.
This is totally true, which makes Matt’s title and initial section that takes a tone suggesting a critical view of the ADA incredibly puzzling.
Halfway through the piece he abandons it completely and reveals that the basic problem is contracting barriers for public projects and the ADA is completely irrelevant to his thesis. Absent the ADA Amtrak would have exactly the same crappy facilities and would also not feel obligated to help parents of young children or people in wheelchairs, who presumably would simply not ride trains in most cases. Why spend the first paragraphs punching down?
These adversarial “solutions” often produce things that technically make it usable, but only in an emergency. Like a pedestrian bridge over the freeway that you have to go up three floors of ramps for, or a multi-elevator trip to the subway station through unventilated elevators filled with a combination of urine and cleaning product fumes, or a bus system that technically gets within a couple blocks of every point in town but only once an hour and on winding routes.
In all these cases, if access had been built in from the start, I’m sure a much better solution could have been arrived at, but it would require some sort of serious change to the project itself. Instead they just throw millions of dollars at it.
Yes, but I’d like to see Matt run this back to how the incentives for government projects and administration can be changed. With poorly designed incentives, you get the wrong skills and do the wrong things and you do those wrong things badly.
When I think of ADA, the first thing that comes to mind is a sleazy lawyer shaking down a small business because the bathroom grab handle is located two inches too low.
.... and that's a classic example of why adversarial legalism is a problem. If it was a normal inspection-and-regulation system, then the inspector would say "grab handle's too low, move it up two inches", you'd get a contractor in, move the handle, and that would be the end of it.
But then you'd have to hire and pay an army of inspectors--the reason we prefer leaving it up to the lawyers is that we don't have to pay them, they take their pound of flesh from the defendant when they win a case/settlement.
Indeed, and while lawyers may take a pound of flesh, they do it only occasionally. While inspectors would take an ounce hundred times for each pound that a lawyer would take.
Interesting article. Thanks for sharing. I'm still not sure that the current costs are as high as it would be to have a legion of inspectors going around issuing fines and such, but much less certain of that than I was.
They’re certainly much less fairly distributed the way we do it. The costs of inspection are borne by society, and shouldn’t be too much more than the inspectors we already have. But forcing a business to go under for an honest mistake simply as a rent-seeking enterprise is messed up.
That would only work if someone asked the business to raise the grab handle two inches and the business refused. If they just raised the grab handle then a judge would throw out the case.
Not exactly. The way it works is that the lawyer can make the request, but the request can be dealt with by paying a settlement, no fixing anything required. That's the "sleazy" part.
And it's been interesting to see the backlash to similar (albeit more extreme) "vigilante justice" solutions employed with abortion. The right learned from the left and then accelerated. It changed my view on this kind of approach in general.
Bathrooms are my favourite personally-relevant "a-commode-ation"; as much as it's a flippantly dismissive response to a deeply entrenched incentive status quo, "just make all bathrooms single stall unisex!" led to a lot of nice outcomes locally. It really is nice having more square footage to squat in, it's plenty of room for ADA grab bars and the like, more baby-changing stations (dads shop with kids too!), and - biggest single benefit for me - I never have to experience the degradation of urinals ever again. Yes, there are some aggregate tradeoffs vs. traditional sex-segregated designs, but each individual accommodation is strictly superior. (Although for the life of me, I will never understand why men leave the seat up in coed bathrooms. Social norms take time to catch up to physical reality.)
The converse of this principle: instead of special accommodations, disfavoured groups get anti-accommodations. I'm thinking of hostile architecture, those weird random bumps to deter skateboard grinding, etc. I think the same solution entails here as well: rather than making an exceptional punishment targeting a specific group, with spillover effects harming everyone else too, it'd be better to ask for __more__. Housing and shelter space for the homeless, skate parks for the Hawkish Tonys. There's only so much land to go around, but devoting too little of it to meet specific market demands inevitably means, the public commons gets used for those specialty purposes instead. To everyone's detriment. Scarcity mindset is bad, actually!
Henry is correct. Having only unisex bathrooms is inefficient and worse for everyone. As often we can learn from Scandinavia and other advanced countries. You don’t need unisex bathrooms for dads to have baby changing stations, just put some in the men’s bathrooms too! That’s the real feminist thing to do!
Truth is some women (and men!) don’t feel comfortable in unisex bathrooms. Moreover, they’re inefficient. Just compare the lines when you have separated bathrooms. Urinals make things go much faster. Cancelling them won’t help anyone but simply make things worse for all. And it’s not just about time either. Men can easily make a mess peeing in public toilets. Women would certainly not benefit from the arrangement.
In a big venue with a constant stream of bathroom users, you want some urinals to accommodate one common use-case quickly and efficiently. In a small venue where you get one or two or three random users with gaps between them, you want one or two unisex stalls, so that you can either cut down on costs by only supplying one, or so that a second person who has to go doesn’t have to wait if the previous person is coincidentally of the same sex.
OTOH it is kind of ridiculous to have single-person restrooms segregated by sex--if there's only one person at a time (common in places like Starbucks), why should it matter which sex they are?
I worked as a janitor throughout college, and while the men's restrooms were generally dirtier, the women's restrooms seemed to have far more 'catastrophic situations'.
Make single occupant bathrooms contain a urinal and a toilet, maybe?
Most of the mess men make is from pissing everywhere when we don't have urinals.
I'll defer to your expertise, but I'll just offer the observation that, while I haven't been in many women's restrooms, every single one of them I've been in has had doors on ALL the stalls and seats on ALL the toilets, which makes them infinitely superior to probably 10% of the men's restrooms I've been in, and that's not even talking about the availability of furniture (particularly couches), moisturizer, (fake) flowers, special mirrors, special lighting, and other features I've observed over the years in women's restrooms that I've never observed in a men's restroom.
Unironically I think this is kind of the rationale, either implicit or explicit. I think everyone expects that *on average* you're going to end up with at least one bathroom relatively cleaner--specifically, the women's room--if you have single sex single-occupancy bathrooms. Depending on local bathroom traffic conditions and occupancy rates this might be a decent equilibrium because the alternative from a practical user experience perspective is less "same amount of filth, divided by two" and more "two filthy and unpleasant bathrooms instead of one."
I don't really have a strong opinion on policy here, but I think there's probably some actual non-zero substance to the single-sex single-occupancy position, although I imagine that many won't find it a particularly compelling one.
What do you mean by "weird random bumps to deter skateboard grinding"? I hope you're not referring to the orderly rows of bumps on wheelchair ramps that are for the benefit of the blind, so they are not confused by the lack of curb.
Efficient for a bit under half the population, some of the time. (Not that I haven't experienced the horrors of attempted solid waste disposal in a urinal...) I'd actually be curious to see hard data on that. Since one will always require some number of stalls, the cleaning requirements differ (splashback...aim lower!), realistically dudes always leave at least 1 urinal between themselves and every other guy...and so on. I think there's also a lot to be said for not making going such a brutally-utilitarian experience. Tastefully pleasant bathrooms used at a sedate pace are rare socially-acceptable islands of tranquility in an otherwise mad gyre of frenetic activity. There are reasons beyond strict biology why women take longer! It's one of the only times I ever get to sit down at my job, lol. Urinals didn't even grant that small mercy.
Level boarding does seem like a "strictly better", at least. Not just for rolling bags and ADA, but also for bikes and scooters, strollers, kids and other short folks...and people wearing high heels. (I can imagine an entire tedious-gap-analysis campaign based around Poor Accessibility Disproportionately Harms Women based on this factoid alone, the ads write themselves. Public Transit, more like Patriarchy Transit. First the Male Gaze forces us to prioritize dangerously inefficient footwear, then it coerces car culture due to non-level boarding...)
>realistically dudes always leave at least 1 urinal between themselves and every other guy
Obviously, if there are multiple urinals free, people will leave gaps but I have never seen someone wait to use a urinal just to avoid standing directly next to someone else. Urinals in airports, sporting events, and movie theaters are frequently packed to the gills.
Taking it a step further--the Metrodome had troughs. When they tore it down and the Twins/Gophers/Vikings got new stadiums, we got urinals. Noticeably longer wait times. RIP troughs :(
"I'd actually be curious to see hard data on that."
I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but, based on my multi-decades long observation of every concert venue, airport, or other place I've been where there are surges in bathroom use, I'd be willing to wager an extremely large sum of money that a properly constructed study would verify that a bathroom with 50-50 urinals and stalls has a higher throughput than a bathroom with the same number of waste receptacles but 100% are stalls.
The basic point here is correct but I'm struggling to see why any of these train station problems show that "adversarial legalism" is so weird. The ADA just creates a floor. Yes it doesn't solve every problem, but the floor is an incentive to seek more elegant solutions. Sometimes society does that successfully: there have been all kinds of general innovations in accessible technology over the years. Sometimes it doesn't, and where people stubbornly resist innovation for one reason or another, that's when you see examples like the Union Station thing. But there's nothing weird about that. Creating that "weirdness" is precisely how you get people to find general solutions. It's not for nothing that the adversarially legal US is, on the whole, better on accessibility than its non-adversarial Western counterparts, and not just because those countries tend to have older stuff.
Matt's got this whole Thing about adversarial legalism that comes out in drips and drabs, like this post, but hasn't yet put the whole fleshed-out theory into one coherent post. To my best understanding, the context here is like a bigger version of "can lead a horse to water, but can't make it drink"...adversarial legalism creates roundabout incentive structures that reward CYA, such as special ADA accommodations, rather than tackling object-level problems like improving accessibility for everyone. Which would ultimately lead to a better equilibrium, since a better product/service means more people of all kinds will use it (= revenues, political support), rather than lack of a costly accommodation deterring mostly marginal customers. (I suppose that's an unintended pun, marginal in the leftist sense and also in the economics sense...) But, yes, there's still some missing pieces between there and the conclusion that AL is one of the Seven Deadly Policy Sins. Implied, but not made explicit.
To be more specific, I get how "adversarial legalism" doesn't solve problems as well as "tackling object-level problems" does. What I don't get it is why those two things are in opposition to each other. Creating a floor through adversarial legalism, if anything, would seem to incentivize tackling object-level problems - maybe that's not the case, I don't hold to that strongly, but even if it's not so, I can't see any way that the former would *discourage* the latter. It's really a "why not both" situation.
I don’t see why this is true. It’s quite possible for the US to be richer than other countries despite (rather than because of) seemingly economically harmful policies - and it’s a more sensible explanation.
This heuristic makes sense for major things like energy policy or the healthcare system but for things like how ADA is implemented it’s not realistic to think even a terrible version of it is going to impoverish the country.
This is akin to, "Tampa Bay won the Super Bowl therefor they _must_ have the best running backs, the best quarterback, the best wide receivers, the best tight ends, the best defensive (and offensive) lines and the best kickers."
Yes, the references to legal adversarialism here seem a little stray. It almost feels like the article started off with an idea that ADA is an example of the problems of "legal adversarialism", but that thesis foundered on the realization that the main shortcoming with ADA isn't how it's enforced (ie, private lawsuits rather than administrative actions), but with the actual legal standard that ADA sets, regardless of how it's enforced, that does not require more than reasonable accommodation. And that's significantly a function of factors external to the ADA, such as high construction costs.
I think there’s some issue with what adversarial legalism can actually create. It can create patches on top. It can’t create thoughtful design from the start.
This sort of depends on how effective you think that the deterrent effect of tort law is. I think most legal scholars these days would argue that the real value of tort is in the ex ante incentives it creates rather than the ex-post results of nominally "making people whole." This is absolutely the dominant view of the benefits of class action suits for damages, in which no one pretends that $15 your'e not actually going to claim 5 or 10 years after the fact is a meaningful remedy to the members of the class, but the expense of the suit is believed to have a meaningful deterrent effect on would-be defendants and that's where the social value is created (in theory).
In practice, the Anglo-American legal system is just flat out bad at dealing with at least mass torts and always has been, it's just that such torts used to be less common because the scale of the tortfeasors was smaller. When it comes to things that affect more than a few tens of potential plaintiffs at once, your best options are likely to be either competition and the profit motive or else pure prescriptive legislation, especially for anything path-dependent.
Because it siphons off energy from a broader reform agenda to specific legal rabbit holes that probably aren’t all that great from a utilitarian cost benefit analysis. Instead of having to make really broad trade offs to include the marginalized everywhere we just get narrowly tailored lawsuits which prioritize highly specialized trade offs at really high costs.
I see this a ton in education where we just keep piling up bandaids on serious problems and it’s missing the big picture.
“Right now the government, sadly, has lost any sense of urgency about developing next-generation Covid-19 vaccines that could target multiple variants at once and block transmission by putting defenses in our noses. Better vaccines would reduce Covid-19 just by virtue of being better. But better vaccines would also be more widely used, so the social efficacy of superior vaccines would be dramatically higher.”
This is a very interesting use of resources for something which is likely to converge with the lethality of the other common cold strains over the next half-generation or so.
Maybe it passes muster from a cost-benefit analysis in isolation, but set against all the other demands on our research funding, I think not. I’d rather be spending more money on a universal flu vaccine against the day when a really bad recombinant event gives us a *real* pandemic to worry about, among other things.
Sorry, but you’re assuming it’s going to “ converge with the lethality of the other common cold strains ” based on what? Every expert I read repeatedly says there is no way to know where the virus is going in terms of lethality. It could get better or *worse*, and if it stays roughly the same we are projected with at least 100k extra deaths every year in the states for years to come. When COVID started that kind of number seemed unbelievably horrifying. And all this without counting long COVID or simply the economic damage from all the extra time off work from a new perennial pathogen that you can get repeatedly 2–3 times a year, perhaps more. New, better vaccines from covid are an extremely important priority. Some of these btw, such as pan coronavirus vaccines, may well anticipate another pandemic (COVID is the third lethal coronavirus in the last generation). It goes without saying that other pharmaceutical developments should also be supported, but next gen covid interventions should definitely be top priority. It’s a totally no brainer.
> Every expert I read repeatedly says there is no way to know where the virus is going in terms of lethality.
You're both right. My understanding is that pretty much everyone agrees it will land on cold level lethality on a *long enough timeline*, not sure how consensus "half-generation" is. But until it lands there, things could definitely get worse
"Sorry, but you’re assuming it’s going to 'converge with the lethality of the other common cold strains' based on what?"
I can't speak for David R., but I assume that based on what we can rationally infer about the history of diseases: mutations in highly communicable diseases must on average trend toward being less lethal over time because, if the opposite were true, then the past few hundred thousand years of co-evolution of diseases with humans or near-humans (since great apes can catch many types of human diseases, I have to presume Neanderthals, etc. could too) would have already produced some sort of disease with a large zoonotic reservoir, the transmissibility of measles, and lethality of Ebola. It makes far more sense to presume COVID-19 will follow the pattern we can infer every other disease followed than to believe that we're living in an era where a disease breaks that ironclad trend.
Not sure I understand you. Do you mean to say that a highly-transmissable, highly-lethal disease is not possible?
Also, there are two fallacies in your analysis. 1. the human-animal interaction is getting more and more entangled in manner that has not at all been consistent in the past few hundred years. 2. even if you are correct about the "long term" (decades? generations?) this does not at all negate the danger of a short and medium term lethal strain the covld wipe out a few extra millions or god forbid more than that before we reach that equilibrium. That does, in fact, have ample precedent, including in relatively recent (20th cent.) history. The world today is far more prone to high transmissibility , and covid is currently hosted and transmitted by a record number of people, and is mutating at astounding pace.
I mean a highly-transmissible, highly-lethal disease is possible as a "novel" disease coming from a zoonotic source, but that once one arises subsequent mutations will on average make it less lethal over time.
Again, though, it seems already that the primary mediating factor here has almost nothing to do with the viruses in question, and almost everything to do with human immune responses.
That's not to say "we're home free", but it is to say that "mutating at an astounding pace" is not some unexpected, immensely threatening concept. It's *the norm for all endemic respiratory viruses,* which still kill very few people. The only exception to this rule is, as I mention elsewhere, the flu, which is far too capable of recombination across multi-species strains for anyone to ever feel safe.
I feel like you and I have had this *exact* discussion, but the synopsis is that there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that all the coronaviruses which today cause common colds made the leap from zoonotic reservoirs to humans in a similar fashion, causing a pandemic.
At this point there much more evidence suggesting that the Russian Flu of 1889 was caused by a coronavirus originally found in cow herds in Central Asia than any strain of the flu. That virus today causes mild cold symptoms; it's still closely related to the original, it mutates fairly rapidly as does COVID, and we've not done anywhere near enough population survey work to understand how widely it spreads each winter, but the answer seems to be "very".
If that theory is broadly accurate, and I think it is, then the lethality of one of these viruses is not mediated mainly by its own evolution into a state that makes it less deadly to humans. It is instead mediated mostly or entirely by humanity's accumulation of an effective immune memory and long-term immune response to that virus in all of its guises and strains, such that even new mutations cause only mild symptoms in the vast majority of people.
Those long-term immune processes are simply not good enough or quick enough to prevent people from getting sick entirely, but they're more than sufficient to see off the threat quickly after a mild illness.
The other half of the equation is that everything I've read says there's likely no way to get the body to generate durable short-term immunity (permanent presence of antibodies, etc) to a coronavirus. We can be infected by an identical strain of common cold coronavirus less than six months after recovering from it.
So the single most needed measure is a bivalent COVID-and-flu-strains-du-jour vaccine for each fall, and that's it. Normalize the damned thing so much that at least the same 65% of people who get an annual flu vaccine do this as well. Nothing much better is likely achievable, and even a universal coronavirus vaccine would produce an immune response lasting a few months.
Given that reality, I'd rather spend our limited funds on something else, both because that something else is likely to be more valuable over a longer timeframe in its own right, and because the "holy grail" of a "good" vaccine is likely unachievable and failure will give the COVID nuts another handle to regain more purchase in our public discourse, which is a terrible outcome that should be avoided at all costs.
Is there any additional evidence about the 1889 pandemic since the time Matt wrote about it here? I would love to know what it really was, and the coronavirus theory is so tempting, but not obviously *that* strongly supported.
Someone did the gene-sequencing work to link the existing strain of coronavirus back to the bovine variety and figured out that they diverged around 1890, give or take a few years; I believe there was also a paper that claimed to rule out the originally mooted strain of flu.
There's something of an effort to go through all the dusty biology department and museum of natural history samples and find some actual samples from that pandemic for testing to see if we can figure that out once and for all.
Not sure what else, what I read when following up on his article was compelling enough to be pretty sold on this, so haven't really interrogated the concept further.
Yeah I had seen all that (except the possible paper ruling out a strain of flu? I recall papers saying symptoms were a bit unusual for flu but not ruling out) actually even before his article and thought it was very suggestive, but not a slam dunk.
I guess no victims of that pandemic were buried in known places under the permafrost like the 1918 victims in Svalbard.
A lot fewer dead and the administrative capacity of the couple states where that might have happened advanced by leaps and bounds between 1890 and 1918, so that's much less likely.
The yawning difference in lethality between 1890 and 1918 is actually one of the things which tells me, "Screw a universal coronavirus vaccine, put whatever money is necessary into a universal flu vaccine, even if it's still an annual one!"
The difference in fatality rates between the two under approximately equal standards of widely available medical care should be *terrifying* to anyone with a sense of history.
So I read similar things. However that’s basically where the 100k deaths in the coming years is coming from. The immunity stage may take a decade or much longer and won’t work for the current elderly. Think of the total damage in the meantime. And that’s in a moderately optimistically scenario assuming a more lethal variant doesn’t come along, which all agree is totally possible and is basically a roll of the dice.(moderately optimistic - because a less lethal development is also possible, but I think it’s wrong to consider the two as cancelling out).
However - pancorona vaccines are critical not to prevent infection but serious illness. As I alluded to in the previous comment, there is every reason to believe another serious corona virus may come along — we had sars, mers and COVID in the past 20 years!— and being protected from it is very worth while ! Also reducing severe outcomes from all potential variants of COVID (i.e. the entirely possible bad scenario that can literally happen at any moment and will continue to hang over us like Damocles sword for the next decade) is equally worthwhile. By contrast to protection from infection, protection from severe outcomes lasts.
Finally, experts seem to believe that nasal vaccine may actually be effective in preventing infection in the long term, so that’s definitely worth developing!
A universal coronavirus vaccine ain't a bad idea, but let's not get too wrapped up in the idea of preparing for the last war. It was blind fucking luck that the family of viruses currently most exposed to humans and closest to the evolutionary leap that allowed them to infect us was a coronavirus and not something else.
What's true of coronaviruses causing common cold symptoms is presumably also true of all the rhinoviruses and adenoviruses, so it's very likely they all started this way at some point in the dusty annals of history or pre-history.
I've read stuff either way on the IN vaccines so we'll see. But that's just it, they're already in stage 2 (and maybe some in stage 3?) trials, what more funding do you want?
If they work well they'll end up as the frontline vaccines before long.
Well, you need to start from somewhere, and contrary to what you and many insist on saying, the war isn't over. It shifted from the initial emergency phase, yes, but over it is not. 100k excess death in each of the coming years (whihc is , mind you far, *less* than what we had thus far) courtesy of a new top-ten cause of mortality is not "over" by any sane measure.
So yes, starting there sounds like a very good idea, and I bet the technological and scientific breakthroughs involved will then be applicable to numerous other diseases and fields. Starting there doesn't mean stopping there, but not starting there doesn't make sense to me.
Which then begs the question, again, what more funding do you want?
Matt of all people ought to understand that we’re now in Secret Congress territory. There’s plenty of money and plenty of research ongoing. Probably more than indicated by the long-term threat level relative to the flu and others.
Where are 65% getting the flu shot? More like 50% (in the US at least). And I’ll be interested to see how the experience with the Covid vaccine changed those numbers. Wouldn’t surprise me to see it drop as people are coming to terms with the ineffectiveness of the Covid jabs.
And don’t we have pretty good reason to believe that Covid isn’t going to be stacked on top of other seasonal illnesses? Maybe risk goes up a little, maybe the number of times you call in sick goes up a little, but there’s good evidence for cross-immunity with other coronaviruses, plus there’s the strange viral competition mechanism where only one of a family of viruses is dominant in the environment at any given time...It isn’t well understood, but there’s lots of empirical evidence for it. (A exhibit A - Flu disappeared around the world for 2 years - and not just in places that were locked down)
I'd love to see a post on why the federal government isn't doing more here. I doubt it's just the technical challenge. Do they substantively think it's not a good plan? Have they just prioritized other things? Do they reflexively not want to do the same thing as the Trump administration did?
I think the scale of all problems is so huge, that people just psychologically give up. Why is the cost of putting elevators so high in mass transit stations? Well, that is likely a mixture of political, corporate and union corruption. When you see monumentally bad decisions occurring time after time, you can but shrug your shoulders.
Also, the only people still talking about Covid-19 on Twitter are the covid forever and covid denialist people. Everyone else has moved on. Biden needs to shut up about vaccinations.
Edit: I should have been clearer that it is covid vaccination I was referring to.
Something like...a bit over...30%? of US adults have gotten the old booster. Clearly not the revealed preference of the majority. To the extent that politicians ought to prioritize popularism over base appeals/mobilization delusion, the cost might be low, but the alternative could be higher and chase a bigger payout too. Maybe. (Of course, renewing the Public Health Emergency just sends even more mixed signals...especially strange for a supposedly-over pandemic?)
That's just political calculus, not public health, but we've certainly seen now how the former affects the latter over the last few years...
I'd hope that sometime in the future, "up to date" won't mean "got the latest out-of-date too-late-to-capture-majority-of-benefits booster". It's probably still net good advice, but given that one is still required to take the other OG vaxx shots before the new booster, the audience is smaller than one would think...
Just FYI, the booster now on offer is in fact optimized for the variant that is still currently causing some 90% of cases. It’s unbelievably up-to-date and sadly underrated.
It's weird. First the dithering about whether to update boosters and thane when they did, the roll it out in such a low key way. Why not "Flash! updated booster is finally here! Get yours ASAP!" I got mine becasue Zeynep Tufekci wrote about it. What happened to public service advertising like "Just say no!"
Perhaps that's a take you disagreed with too, I don't know. But it's not at all unreasonable to notice that we had the pieces in place for the new booster for several months, and the release mostly got pushed back for...what? Dotting all the t's and crossing all the i's for the FDA and other conservative (risk-averse) gatekeepers, maybe? No one will ever know the full story, I guess...but in the meantime, thousands more got seriously ill and died that didn't have to. That, to me and many others, is pretty upsetting and disappointing. People die, that's what they do, but it's extra bad when it's seemingly easily preventable.
That's what I mean when I say being too late to capture the majority of benefits...at this later point we're looking at at least 3 competitive Omicron sub-variants that all display significant immune evasion. Just in time for holiday gatherings, flu season, and new winter waves. The booster will still help, but...imagine if we coulda had a fresh booster not that long after the Dec-Feb megawaves. Perhaps then people would care more, and adoption wouldn't be in the single-to-low double digits. (Places with higher uptake I'd expect to already be highly 3-vaxxed, so the marginal benefit is smaller.) Things have just been too normal for too long now, few outside Twitter etc. care strongly anymore*. It doesn't matter if you have a perfect vaccine when no one bothers to take it :(
(To be explicit, it's specifically the "Just FYI/is in fact" that struck me as unnecessarily rude. People can have different valid conclusions despite knowing the same set of facts. They don't have to be ignorant...and I am not. On this anyway.)
*Midterms polling on "what do you think are the top X issues facing America?" type questions have been consistently showing covid...like...not even top20. Beaten out by abortion, immigration, climate change, inflation, Ukraine...
A recent editorial by a member of the FDA’s Vaccine Advisory Committee noted,
“…Moderna recently published a study on the clinical efficacy of the bivalent vaccine containing BA.1. Sixteen cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections occurred: 11 in the bivalent group and five in the monovalent group. For those who suffered clinical illness, five were in the bivalent group and one in the monovalent group. In other words, although the numbers were small, the monovalent vaccine performed better than the bivalent vaccine.”
“…second booster in adults who had previously received a two-dose (100-μg) primary series and first booster (50-μg) dose of mRNA-1273 (≥3 months earlier)”
It is objectively harder to put elevators into a completed building than to build them as part of the original structure, especially when that building is old and made of brick and stone and stuff and used by thousands of people every day.
The scale of problems today is much smaller than in, say, 1840, when a working family spend the majority of its wages on food and a war or bad harvest could cause malnutrition. And yet the men of 1840 ended up advancing our species past 200,000 years of preindustrial squalor.
Yeah this is so wrong in so many ways. “The men” of 1840 didn’t start from scratch, to use an understatement of , well, historic, proportions. The men who made the advances were also rarely if ever in risk of malnutrition*… and needless to say, there was plenty of squalor both before and after 1840 but that’s hardly the sum of the world at any point in history.
*you may however argue that the famous 19th cent. men who advanced the species were not an island but part of an economy and society of the men AND women of 1840 who gave them the means to get there. The perennial debate about the role of the individual in history.
I don't understand how you think his underlying point is wrong. The problems people had in 1840s, even wealthy people, were typically far in excess of modern people simply because technology (especially medical!) has advanced so far.
On the subject of accommodations, I’m not usually a ‘government waste’ guy, but shouldn’t the feds do some serious soul searching about this insane Havana Syndrome fiasco?
At a minimum it seems highly inappropriate that we gave hundreds of thousands to individuals on the basis of a conspiracy theory. More narrowly, it seems like there need to be some real changes at the CIA. Now only were their own personnel among the “victims” of Havana Syndrome, the Agency validated the theory! It’s even more ludicrous (though more anodyne) than Hussein’s WMDs!
Somehow (I think because of the parallels to Long COVID or some Trump drama), Havana syndrome got left-right coded, but it really shouldn’t be. It’s worth getting to the bottom of how the entire foreign policy wing of the government lost their minds on this.
There are plenty of syndromes that we are supposed to pay attention to though there are no organic medical ways of confirming them. Havana Syndrome is just one more added to a list of Chronic Fatige, chronic Lyme, fibromyalgia, probably long COVID.....
I suspect that all of these are different names for essentially the same thing. I've seen enough reasonably well-adapted physically fit people go into severe declines with something like this not to believe there is something to it, though whether that something is a physical disease or a psychological condition is one that I'm not qualified to answer (and, even if it is psychological, that doesn't mean you don't need to treat it physically).
Which side did it get left-right coded on? I’ve seen both sides of the claim in my media diet, which is pretty left, and have no idea how it’s discussed on the right.
The first is that it's mainly affecting people who are smart and think of themselves as smart. People who are smart often think they're immune to motivated reasoning/falling for conspiracy theories and others think they're immune to that kind of thinking, so there's a tendency to decide they must be right.
Secondly, it's considered bad form to doubt people in national security positions when it comes to things like this. We can say they got it all wrong when it came to Saddam Hussein's alleged WMDs, but doubting what they're saying about what caused their symptoms is in poor taste.
Finally, psychogenic conditions are stereotyped as feminine. They are more common in women but men can get them too. They're also regarded as something that people with poor mental health get Havana Syndrome is happening to the kind o people who are stereotyped as tough and manly so there is going to be a ton of pushback against the idea that people in national security are suffering from psychogenic illness because that's something teenage girls get. The mental health aspect is also important because having a mental health condition can endanger your security clearance.
It's probably easier to go along with the sonic weapon explanation rather than suggesting that it's psychogenic.
I've seen many situations where ADA has led to some strange outcomes due to the "adversarial legalism" discussed here. Take handicapped parking spaces at hiking trails, for instance. What's supposed to be accommodations for the disabled effectively amounts to a perk given to spouses or parents of the disabled, where if they want to go hiking at a popular trailhead, they don't need to leave as early as everybody else to find parking. Of all the ways government can help the disabled, this type of perk feels exceedingly strange. Yet, it's commonplace, perhaps because the trailhead restroom is technically considered a "public building" in the eyes of the law, never mind that it's always dirty and smelly, and handicapped people driving by have much better places to stop in and use the bathroom.
The transit system is another example. In the aftermath of the 2008 recession, a transit agency near me removed all Sunday service for several years; they justified it by the fact that it was operationally efficient; not running regular buses on Sunday meant the feds would allow them to not run paratransit on Sunday either. Under the law, running regular buses without special ADA paratransit buses is considered a big no-no, but not running any buses at all, so that all transit riders have to suffer together, the law says that's ok. In fact, there even exists some exurban/rural transit systems where ADA paratransit is their *only* service, and your ability to ride the bus anywhere at all requires being disabled. Again, this is what happens when well-meaning laws come with twisted incentive structures. If the federal government really wants transit to be accessible to the disabled, they should provide money to help pay for it (carrots), rather than arbitrary rules that force small agencies to cut all other service to accommodate it (sticks).
"Something that a lot of people who I like and respect are probably too good at is explaining why this or that problem can’t be solved because of dysfunctional contracting relationships or bad labor unions or whatever.
What I always want to say in response is that while of course these problems would’ve been solved already if they were easy to solve, I reject the idea that they are genuinely unsolvable."
I cannot endorse this statement and subsequent follow up enough. It might be at the core as to why I consider myself a left of center person. Namely, problems, no matter how intractable, can be solved and solutions often involve some sort of government action, even if that action is literally removing government from the equation (i.e. zoning reform).
I give this anecdote a lot, but it really speaks to my worldview (and the sentiments above). My mother told me back in 2008 there was three things she was 100% sure would not happen in her lifetime when I was born in 1983; fall of the Berlin wall, peace in Northern Ireland and election of a black President. In retrospect, these events may not look that shocking when we look back at some basic facts of recent history (the economic structure of the Soviet Union was doomed to fail once oil prices fell, Americans views on race have slowly but surely become more accepting over time since the 60s etc.). But in 1983, you could have won a lot of money betting on one of these three things happening let alone all three.
My point is, I just fundamentally reject the idea that problems can't solved. As sort of of a coda to this sentiment, I remember thinking maybe 6 months ago why is that of all the people on twitter, why is it Megan McCardle boils my blood the most. There are certainly countless number of people way more terrible or odious in about a thousand different ways on twitter. But I realized its because she more than anyone I can think of (with exception of maybe certain very lefty environmentalists), is a complete cynic about the ability of anything to change for the better and most especially that government can be an agent of change for the better. And I just fundamentally reject that premise.
Do you believe there are categories of problems that government cannot solve? Do you believe there are categories of problems that other entities can better solve than government can?
Odd, one of the reasons why I've really enjoyed Megan McArdle's work over the years is very much pointing out the daunting challenges of solving problems. Reading her work in isolation (like anyone else) isn't good, but when read in conjunction with others I've found her work quite useful.
There a number of people I don't read precisely because they are charlatans/cranks/or lunatics. My point is I read Megan, because she is not that and does make some reasonable points about as you say "the daunting challenges of solving problems". I think for me the more I read her, the more I realized that this is her default viewpoint on...everything. It's a form of extreme cynicism and what I call "the politics of giving up". Again, I noted there is a similar strain on the environmental left. But it became exhausting to me to realize she takes these not as challenges to overcome, but impenetrable barriers.
I should also say, I got especially annoyed at her higher education musings. With a last name of "Chaudhuri" you can imagine I've taken a bit of a personal interest in these battles about school admissions/Affirmative Action/Higher education affordability. She basically defended "legacy" admissions by saying this is the way smart working and middle class people should get jobs. And then she basically off handedly noted that she had terrible grades but good test scores and got into Penn because of the scores. Given the time period she went to college, it seems extremely clear to me she's leaving out a key part of the story; namely she likely had family help getting in. My point, it's easy to be an extreme cynic of changing the status quo when you've benefitted tremendously from the status quo. I dunno, the whole thing just really rubbed me the wrong way and colored my opinion of her writing.
Is it possible that many (though not all) of these problems are downstream of the fact that we have an astoundingly slow legal system? How much of an outlier are we in that regard?
I think about this a lot when I see those little curb cut ramps off the sidewalk into a crosswalk: sued into existence for wheelchair users, but really so nice for strollers, the elderly, or when you’re pulling a suitcase...
It’s frustrating how many sidewalks don’t have them! If sidewalks were built by cities, they would be able to be rolled out in a generation as sidewalks are repaired. But with the system we have where each stretch of sidewalk has a different owner, and it takes lawsuits to force an owner to come up to code, we end up with an unusable mishmash in many smaller towns. (And parts of big cities, like Los Angeles.)
> But with the system we have where each stretch of sidewalk has a different owner,
My "favorite" consequence of this are all the sidewalks to nowhere. Each new subdivision that gets built adds a little stretch of sidewalk on the main road, but then none of them are connected!
I also see a lot of sidewalks to nowhere within subdivisions. The street has no sidewalk, except for in front of one isolated house, where it does.
Still, these sidewalks to nowhere are not completely useless. If you're walking down the street and happen to be walking by one when a car comes up, they give you space to pull off the road and let the car go by. I suppose that's something.
I can't speak for any other city, but in Denver curb cuts *are* put into existing sidewalks by the city because it's responsible for maintaining curbs; property owners are just responsible for sidewalks.
Oh, is *that* why the sidewalks are such a mess in the US? Here, the pavement is part of the right of way, which means it gets repaired or changed or whatever by the council.
Legally, in the UK, in some streets the homeowner's property comes to the centreline of the road and in others it stops at the boundary between their property (ie their drive / front garden) and the pavement (and the local council owns the road and pavement), but that is only relevant if the right of way ceases to be adopted by the council; for as long as it is adopted, the council is responsible for maintaining and cleaning it, but also has the right to change the layout (e.g. putting in a cycle or bus lane) and never needs to refer to the landowner for permission.
If it's unadopted, then the landowner is legally responsible for the maintenance of the entire right of way (both the roadway and the pavement). This is expensive, so new developments have to make sure the council will adopt the new roads - sometimes this involves a substantial payment to the council in exchange for adoption.
That makes a lot more sense. Every time there's a snowstorm in a major US city, I see friends on Facebook talking about shoveling out their sidewalk. It seems weird to me that the street is done by the city, while the sidewalk is done by the property owners. The only justification I can see is that the city has big street-sized sweepers that can do the streets, while sidewalks are done with shovels, and shoveling work is more efficient when it is done in a distributed way by many individuals. But that just raises the question, why doesn't the city have sidewalk-sized sweepers?!
Many US cities do have sidewalk snow plows. I reckon the common imposition of sidewalk snow-removal obligations on property owners is a mixture of path dependence (these ordinances have been on the books a long time, and there's no compelling reason to remove them), practicality (it helps get sidewalks cleared more quickly) and budgetary (the sidewalk plowing budget doesn't need to be so large).
There's a Law Review article idea I've had kicking around in my head for a while about how sidewalk-clearing obligations probably have a lot of practical utility but nevertheless seem conceptually like 13th amendment violations. I just have a hard time distinguishing them from something like the corvee system in principle even though obviously there's a big gulf in practice.
There's not really a meaningful sense in which an urban sidewalk is anything but public property that private owners are forced to provide upkeep for.
I don't see how they would be a 13th Amendment violation: you're not required to clean the sidewalk yourself, just to make sure it's been cleared. (I'm not an expert on 13th Amendment law, but my very strong impression is that if you can pay a third party to perform the task for you, it's not going to be considered a 13th Amendment violation.)
I can't begin to wrap my head around what the expense would be to make snow clearance on sidewalks a municipal responsibility! (In Denver, the city doesn't even plow most *streets* except when there's been a really huge snow storm and it isn't expected to melt quickly enough.)
If the city doesn't plow the street, then why should anyone clear the sidewalk? If they do plow the street, then they can plow the sidewalk at the same time.
"If the city doesn't plow the street, then why should anyone clear the sidewalk?"
I'm assuming you're trolling at this point, but:
(1) so you can walk on the sidewalk yourself without trudging through snow;
(2) so you don't get sued by someone else who slips and falls on your uncleared walk;
(3) in many municipalities, you can theoretically be ticketed if you don't clear your sidewalk within a certain time of snowfall ending (typically 24 hours). That's rarely enforced, but still is an extra motivator.
"If they do plow the street, then they can plow the sidewalk at the same time."
Um, no? Cleaning sidewalks would take dramatically more manpower than cleaning streets -- a single truck with a plow can go down a street at probably 10 to 25 MPH depending on traffic, width, and speed limits; there's no way a small plow going down a sidewalk is going to be able to get anywhere near that speed.
It varies a lot by locality, and also individual lots within, in the US. In my own city, some sidewalks are in the public right of way and some aren't. Some that aren't are deliberately designed as such--often an easement will be agreed upon so that the general public can use it for its intended purpose, but the private owners can use trespassing law to prevent vagrancy there.
This, of course, can go bad. As a cyclist, it always frustrates me when new developments regularly cede public corridors for motorist traffic, but not for non-motorist corridors, which often end up as HOA property. Some HOAs are cool with non-resident traffic coming through (or again, they agree to an easement for that purpose), but some gate those off, leaving non-motorists to fend for themselves on the motorist corridors.
If the sidewalk isn't in the public right of way, then what stops the homeowner from removing it entirely?
Ah, the easement, I see. In the UK you can't do that: by law, any such easement would create a public right of way, though not an adopted one (once there is a public right of way, you can't block it, though you're not obliged to maintain the surface unless it's adopted).
If the easement is limited to certain persons, that's different, but one that grants the general public the right to cross the land *is* a public right of way, though the highways authority (the council) would only be obliged to maintain it if it is adopted.
The UK has a four-way distinction:
Private land that people can't travel on (except via the right to roam, which is a whole other subject, but basically means that open land that isn't planted with crops can be crossed by the public; this doesn't create a right of way because there isn't a specific route)
Permissive route, ie the landowner permits access but reserves the right to take it away again. This must be clearly signed or it becomes a public right of way.
Public right of way, if unadopted the landowner must keep it cleared (cannot obstruct or damage, has to remove a tree if it falls across the route) but is not obliged to maintain it.
Adopted public right of way, the highways authority (local council) is obliged to maintain.
Pavements (sidewalks) are always adopted if the roadway is adopted.
But there may be a certain amount of confusion; hunting here means "on horseback following dogs".
Stalking (hunting land animals with a gun) is legal with the landowner's permission, provided the animal is not protected, but only with the owner's permission; you can't just go along a public right of way or use right to roam.
Shooting (birds) is the same as stalking.
Public lands it is impossible to get landowner's permission; stalking and shooting are only legal on private estates, generally only ones specifically set up for the purpose.
Farmers will shoot pest animals on their own land, but they generally don't allow people to do so for pleasure.
In some protected public lands, the park rangers may shoot and kill animals or birds to control populations, but they never issue hunting licences for this purpose.
Here in the UK, you get them a lot for people's drives - my parents, for instance, have a drive that ends at the pavement (sidewalk), and there's a curb cut on the other side of the pavement where it joins the roadway, so they don't have to climb the curb to park.
There's a good 99% Invisible about the curb cut effect - mostly about how that all came into being, but also about how many other things this is true of, when there are lots of other people that benefit.
The point is to get and keep policy at an equilibrium. CDC needed to have a messaging system that depended on constantly changing circumstances. It was disastrous that so much policy energy went into is/ix no COVID a big deal. It is but what to do in any one school/restaurant/workplace /transportation mode depended on the costs and benefits of doing something and those benefits varied with the status of the disease -- its prevalence, number of vaccinated people, etc. CDC was terrible at giving individuals and policy makers the information they needed to find that net benefit point. And the media was terrible about not calling it out for this failing.
The nadir of this failing, for me, was when all our employee lockers got taken away at work..."because covid". Somebody, somewhere, wasn't sufficiently sanitizing their surfaces to appease the lowest common denominator purity anxiety. And that means no one gets to have toys (except our managers, who curiously got to keep *their* personal drawers...hmm!) Nameplates were stripped, locks were bolt cuttered, personal effects were thrown out, years of memorabilia, community art, shrines to the dearly departed (including homages to literally-murdered coworkers) removed. And in the end, everyone ended up using their exact same "day use only lockers" as before, anyway. Completely pointless theatre on top of the hygiene theatre. It's theatre all the way down.
This even though as early as summer 2020 we knew fomite transmission Was Not A Thing, simply a wrongheaded tiny-stakes threat vector compared to aerosol transmission. Ironically, of course, the bleach-your-groceries hawks were the same ones loudly proclaiming They Knew All Along it was aerosols, not droplets...but how could you have meaningful surface transmission if it wasn't primarily droplet-based? Endless bad takes of the same bad study presented badly by the media..."In Contrived Laboratory Scenarios, Covid Can Be Detected On Surfaces Hours After Artificially High Concentrations Are Applied" would have been the accurate headline.
There were any number of other CDC blunders which got used to justify far more extreme overreactions...but this one was the straw that broke my backing of Trust The Science. An outcome that only a tiny shrill minority clamored for, which hurt everyone, significantly eroded the social fabric (we had finks reporting on coworkers who defiantly left stuff overnight in their lockers...what the hell?), with no empirical backing beyond The CDC Now Says. The modern social contract we don't need, but deserve: a NyQuil chicken in every InstaPot. (Yes, I know, that's the FDA rather than the CDC. At least the former performed impeccably regarding covid. And infant formula. And monkeypox.)
Big city mayors ought to be the shock troops of efficiency. The incentives are right. Ordinary mayors have little chance of becoming governor, much less President. But someone who made NYC or Chicago work again might unite city dwellers and corporate republicans and have a punchers chance at higher office.
The broader question is why do so few successful politicians take risks? Why aren’t a couple Republican senators arguing for taxing the rich and a couple Democratic governors experimenting with second trimester abortion restrictions and abundant energy? The existence of a vital center depends upon goring the sacred cows of the parties, and the only people willing to do that seem to be commenters and talk radio hosts.
This is why I miss Mike Bloomberg. He may not have always been right, but he was not beholden to teachers or cops or municipal workers or developers and tried to make the best decisions. We all need altruistic billionaires with no natural constituency to govern. The problem is most billionaires with an interest in politics are like Peter Thiel or Sheldon Adelson.
Bloomberg did a lot of downzoning though, so he clearly felt beholden to some narrow, self-interested constituencies.
Really? I'm not a zoning lawyer, but my experience of living in Brooklyn for forty years is Bloomberg hugely up-zoned the borough and the results have been dramatic. If he felt 'beholden to some narrow, self-interested constituencies', it was developers and the Yimby whiners on this site who've made it nearly unreadable. Please give us more of the rent is too damn high and how a billion Americans is the solution.
Brooklyn population 1970: 2,602,012
Brooklyn population 1980: 2,230,936
Brooklyn population 2010: 2,504,700
Brooklyn population 2020: 2.58 million
Brooklyn # of housing units in 2011: 993,000
Brooklyn # of housing units in 2020: 1,060,000
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/data-maps/nyc-population/historical-population/nyc_total_pop_1900-2010.pdf
https://datacommons.org/tools/timeline#&place=geoId/3604710022&statsVar=Count_Person
https://datacommons.org/tools/timeline#&place=geoId/3604710022&statsVar=Count_HousingUnit
So, the population of the borough is up 16% compared to when you started living in Brooklyn in 1980, but still below its population in 1970.
The number of units of housing in the borough increased 6.7% in the last decade [I can't find figures for # of housing units going back to 1980]
Downtown Brooklyn and Williamsburg are sprouting skyscraper groves, but those have had only a small impact on the actual density of the borough.
+1 for more comments with data
I'm for this even if it skews male, so some more Brooklyn data taken from NYU's Furman Center (inflation adjusted numbers):
- Largest share of household income in Brooklyn: 2019: $100-250 K (25.7%); 2000: less than $20K (21.6%).
- Percent making greater than $250K: 2000: 3.3%; 2021: 6.1%.
-Median rent: 2006: $1190; 2019: $1560.
- Severely rent burdened (spending more than 50% of income on rent): 2019 (29.4%).
People will pay money to hang out with the cool kids.
https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/2014/02/the-quiet-massive-rezoning-of-new-york-078398
This is interesting, but I doubt whatever Bloomberg did in Ozone Park or Richmond Hills to let whatever ethnic group enjoy their little enclave and provide votes to Bloomberg outweighed the massive up-zoning elsewhere.
Where is your data on the “massive upzoning?”
Why are our politicians such fucking cowards has been a personal hobbyhorse of mine for a long time. The vacuum of true leadership is this country is really stark. Matt should write about this
I would argue they're not cowards. They're just maximally self-serving, and on average evince a more intense desire to hold onto office than did the American political leaders of previous decisions. Part of this dynamic includes an increase in the shrewdness with which they avoid putting themselves in a vulnerable position.
I think the important question is: why are so many people in politics so utterly desperate to hold onto their jobs (even at the price of complete rejection of the national interest)?
Are they more desperate? A quick google search suggests that on average 10%+ of reps retire every 2 years - not including those defeated. Given how irrelevant leadership has made most back benchers, I'm surprised its not higher, but that still seems a pretty regular turn over.
>>Are they more desperate?<<
I believe so, yes. They key is: get enough seniority to monetize your experience and Roledex (or national brand) in a serious way upon leaving office. Riches await you. And, yes, that steady stream of "leavers" is what that looks like.
But you have to put in your time on Capitol Hill (or Albany, or Sacramento, or Beacon Hill) to acquite that clout. And that means serving mutliple terms.
Weren’t representatives of past generations, on average, poorer than todays crop? Wouldn’t desperation have decreased? Ambition may have increased, greed may have increased, competition may have increased, but I don’t think desperation has
Desperation might be a bad word choice on my part. But that I simply meant "really, really, REALLY wants to avoid losing the job of being an elected lawmaker."
And yes, a lot of this is greed-driven in my view. Living the good life in America (big house in fancy suburb, pied-a-terre in DC or Manhattan, beach condo, private schools, top end accommodations and vacations destinations. seasons tickets, high end dining) isn't cheap. Generating the kind of income required to live such a life can be had, though, I'm pretty sure, for a former government official with sufficient clout or connections or name recognition. And that, in turn requires reaching a level of stature conferred by serving multiple terms. And before leaving government and cashing in, the increasing clout and influence of members of Congress with growing seniority immeasurably helps the congressional spouse's earning power, according to everything I've read.
(Members of Congress also receive retirement benefits linked to how long they've served, so that's also a pretty direct inducement to avoid losing an election.)
An interesting question raised by your comment. Why don’t more of them take more risks with their relatively safe seats?
My suspicion is that actions in congress carry outside of it much more than they did in the past. Being a good foot soldier in congress opens doors after you leave that being risky would not.
>>An interesting question raised by your comment. Why don’t more of them take more risks with their relatively safe seats?<<
Primary challenges. At least on the GOP side, there's no such thing as a "true" safe seat.
But who are the historical examples that would lead you to claim it’s ever been different?
Lincoln served one term in the House and went back to his law practice.
Confederate politicians took massive risks in the civil war, which ended catastrophically for them.
LBJ took huge risks in supporting the civil rights act.
Because voters are fickle and have a short memory, for the most part. I'm with you, for the record. I'm a big fan of the idea of a politician running on one specific policy goal, accomplishing that thing, and then not running again. Is your thing campaign reform? Is that something the public is clamoring for? Cool, run on a platform of enacting that and then getting the hell out of the way for the next person...I think voters could go for something like that as opposed to someone running to be everything to everybody.
Lawrence Lessig did run on this exact platform in 2016 and it made him a bit of a laughing stock. I don't know if this is a problem of the media latching onto a certain narrative, the fact he was running a Yang style presidential bid with no credentials, or that people actually are turned off by these narrow platforms, but it doesn't bode super well for similar attempts.
I think it's 1 and 2, which then leads to media coverage that produces 3.
I think it's because politicians are accountable to voters... and voters want different (often competing or conflicting) things! It's not that they are afraid to lose, it's that they were elected by a constituency that wants whatever they want -- and what they want is not contracting efficiency, it's usually stuff like free parking, and abatement for rats, trash, and crime. It's *very* hard to make progress on big, meaty problems in one term even if you aren't planning on re-running. I think underrated cause of success for Bloomberg is had three terms (12 years!!) to tackle big issues, plus he had a huge group of policy wonks who'd already been working on his issues (from Bloomberg Philanthropies) to hit the ground running as heads of various agencies. He was also just a spectacularly good manager.
It doesn't seem to me like politicians are optimizing for doing what voters actually want either. They always seem to be avoiding doing unpopular things or taking unpopular stances. But maybe to your point, "doing things" is somewhat unpopular, so the optimal strategy to just to not do things.
The problems with this are a) many goals require more than one term to fulfill, and b) most elected offices require more than one person to be elected and united toward the goal in question.
Occam's razor; people at their core are risk adverse and to that end your median voter has enormous "status quo" bias. At the end of the day, there's just tremendous incentive for politicians to just not "rock the boat". There's a reason someone like Charlie Baker in MA might be the most popular politician in America.
It actually fits in with Matt's (I think correct) insistence that an underrated reason Trump won was that he took health care and social security off the table as issues for Dems to run on in 2016 (he was obviously lying as evidenced by GOP trying to overturn ACA. We forget that Rand Paul of all people, helped barely save it. But it seems pretty clear in retrospect that repealing ACA would have been politically terrible for GOP). And it's also why the Dobbs decision is giving Democrats tail winds in this year's midterms.
Reality is, for all of Trump's awfulness, for the median voter he didn't actually change much and in fact the economy boomed (given how much unwarranted credit is given to any President for what passes Congress, it seems likely to me at least some median voters credited Trump for stimulus checks and enhanced UI).
Basically, it pays politically not to do anything.
I too would enjoy a post on this. However I think the answer will be “it has always been such, because that’s how the system is designed.” There is a reason all our “greatest” presidents after the founding generation have emerged only in times of tremendous national crisis. The people are supposed to lead, and put functionaries in office to execute popular preferences.
For my northern virginia people on here, I see this so starkly in Arlington's missing middle study. These cowards are going to have studied the issue for two years and are going to cave to the NIMBYs and approve no changes whatsoever.
The massive disinvestment of the suburban flight period really did utterly fuck over urban politics.
It used to be that both machine and reformers were focused on accomplishing shit, albeit in very different ways, with different goals, and different levels of outright corruption.
But the way for the machine to maintain power was to dole out public goods to the neighborhoods and demographics which backed it, and their conception of how to do that was to build parks, mass transit, better school buildings, shit that improved quality of life, and to run the schools and hospitals and public health organizations well.
Sure, there were kickbacks and corruption out the wazoo, and lots of jobs were handed out on factors other than merit, but the net effects were smaller than the insane dysfunctions of the current model.
Then the 60's-80's came and destroyed that model. Populations fell, tax base shattered, and city governments were consumed by an all-encompassing focus on doling out the bare bones of patronage to the poor masses that voted them in. And that's what they've been ever since.
There's just no ambition to be found to start with, and now the woke/hipster school of politics has put brainworms in a bunch of the rich-ish folks moving back to the cities that basically lead them to say "improving services, enforcing the law, and building public goods is bad because it leads to gentrification and disproportionate impacts to poor people" instead of "let's build/provide enough of everything for everyone to enjoy, including poor folks."
I don't have a clue how to revamp governance in urban areas, but shooting and burying the mid- and post-disinvestment patronage model is a necessary first step.
> improving services, enforcing the law, and building public goods is bad because it leads to gentrification and disproportionate impacts to poor people
This is an interesting comment but I don't agree with this part of the analysis. Lots of people say things like that on twitter, but that sentiment is not the reason local governance is failing. When I attend local NYC community boards, they might pay lip service to gentrification or whatever, but that's not the real problem. The real problem is people are just fundamentally afraid of change. I'm continually astounded by how *conservative* the old white democrats who run things are. They wouldn't want a new park doled out by their city council member, because that might involve construction or a local business being impacted or they like to park their car in that empty lot. How do you fix constituents who truly don't want anything to get better?
I don't blame the hipster leftists for it, but that school of politics took a constituency which is, basically everywhere else in the world and throughout history, a force for "unfuck this stuff", and turned it into one that's onboard with a status quo of decay and horror for a lot of people.
That said, I don't disagree with your statement above either, and I assure you that old black Democrats are very much identical. Philadelphia is a major force for continuing to run SEPTA as a patronage gig instead of using that money to improve mobility and access to opportunity for the poor, and the reality is that the poor in a lot of places just don't care or don't believe it possible to make fundamental improvements, so long as the city is keeping them from being evicted from their hellhole rental and they can cobble together enough to make ends meet with some crap part-time work and various assistance programs.
This isn't a condemnation of them, it's just to point out that all of this exists downstream of a period in which these cities really did just fall apart. "Hold what I got" is the only important driver in urban politics, whether it's a patronage job that might be made redundant, a shitty rental that might get bought and renovated, an abandoned lot for parking, or a once-an-hour bus service that runs on your block.
There's no constituency for prising these meager benefits away from everyone and enacting fundamental reforms that will replace them with something better because virtually no one believes that the latter half is ever coming.
Frankly, we'll have to gentrify the cities to the point where the poor can't even live in them under the status quo before they'll get on board with reforms. And even then, NYC and San Francisco are only marginally further along that curve than Philly.
You exemplified the problem in your own phrasing. Prying away benefits from people who regularly use and depend on them always comes before the development of a better system.
What? We're not talking about actual social welfare benefits, we're talking about a bunch of random inefficiencies that are doled out unfairly through informal channels and make it impossible for urban governments to provide real benefits and in many instances even basic services.
The police precinct that always assigns a car to park on one commercial stretch and blow off nearby ones and has since 1975.
The folks who turn permitting and construction safety inspections into a game of political connections.
The bus routes that meander to and fro trying to make it so no one ever has to walk two blocks to catch the bus at the expense of it taking two hours for working parents to commute.
The housing authority that doles out land to friendly faces or ineffectual non-profits which never build houses.
The piles of make-work and above-market wages paid to those who do it at the expense of service provision.
The caving to the teachers' and police unions at every turn on accountability and hiring/firing issues.
The unending streams of money spent on pilot projects, planning consultants, feasibility studies, instead of building shit that's needed and letting people get used to it.
The increasingly complex and restrictive zoning overlays, to the point where we can barely even replace housing at 1:1, let alone build anything new.
All of it is part and parcel of the "hunker down" mentality that dominates urban politics.
This has fuck-all to do with social democracy or the welfare state, it's all about the protection of informal, inefficient, but expected "benefits" doled out by city governments decades ago. It's *strangling* us.
It's not that politicians are asking people to give up formal social benefits in exchange for better ones that may never materialize. Tt's that when they moot plans to change *anything,* the 1,500 people who benefit from the status quo turn up to bitch and the 1.5 million who could be slightly better off don't believe it'll work or don't care. And of course, the spineless idiot politicians hold hearings and commission studies and then listen to the dozen people in front of them instead of just *doing* whatever it is because it worked in fifty other places and people will like it once it's in place.
The 1500 vs 1.5m argument is weak sauce. It’s the same argument used time and time again in the US to justify atrocities like bulldozing black neighborhoods for the interstates and burying the bodies of Asian laborers under our train lines.
You should look at some of the jobs at jobs.Seattle.gov. It’s enough to turn every Leslie Knope into a Ron Swanson.
That is an interesting insight that the ones who should be pushing hardest for change are in some cases pushing in the wrong direction.
I wasn't suggesting the old black democrats are different, I just have seen exactly one black community board member in the two CBs where I've attended meetings :/.
NYC and even Chicago have pretty robust tax bases.
They’ve yet to claw their way back from the attitudes incubated in the suburban flight period, though.
Hell even Philadelphia’s tax base holds up ok and it’s further behind still.
I superlike (c) this comment. Living in NYC, I always wonder why, with such a large pool of potential candidates, we have such generally mediocre-to-terrible politicians. But this is also largely true of politicians almost everywhere.
There are a lot of problems right now! It seems like some people other than commenters and talk radio hosts should want to wrestle with them. I’m not sure whether there’s an incentive problem such that only people seeking performance platforms run for office or whether it’s always been pretty bad and we just get lucky occasionally when a serious competent person runs and wins.
The problem with NYC candidates specifically is ballot access. Unless one is a good-standing member of the Democratic Party it is incredibly difficult to get on the ballot.
Trump had pretty awful substance for a politician, but the guy took a lot of risks... the record of them paying off is mixed (winning the Republican primary is probably the most unlikely achievement, beating Hillary less so, and losing to Biden should be seen as a huge failure) but he did re-make the Republican Party in his image.
In politics and government generally there is a huge problem with people never wanting to be the first to try something. The pay-off can be huge though, and for people with other options should they lose an election, in my view it makes sense to take some risks. Does anyone go into public life hoping to make no change?
My suggestion is for MY to lead a campaign to “fix” Union Station, a place I incidentally visit about once a month on a trip from out of town. Let’s have a series of articles on the ins and outs of “getting stuff done” and then draw some fact based conclusions.
I’m a regular user and would happily be an active participant in this campaign…
Fun fact. Tax revenues went up under the Trump tax cuts. As in they were higher than the CBO was projecting before the tax cuts were enacted.
More taxes don't always mean more revenue
Your point about the construction cost overruns killing the chance of construction projects reminds of a joke a Nigerian told me years ago.
A Nigerian and an Indonesian are finishing college in the US together. They have been both been sponsored by their governments and are about to return to their jobs as civil servants
"If you ever come to Indonesia, call me and we can hang out!" says the Indonesian official.
"Really? Cool! Same to you. If you ever come to Nigeria, call me and we can hang out!" says the Nigerian official.
4 years later, the Nigerian comes to Indonesia, remembering about his Indonesian official and decides to call him.
"Hey, I'm coming to Indonesia, want to hang out?" he asks.
"Sure! Just a question, where are you staying?" the Indonesian official asks.
"The Hilton." the Nigerian replies.
"Nah, meet me at the airport. You can live with me for your trip."
"Sounds good."
The Indonesian official pulls up to the airport with a BMW, the latest model. The Nigerian gets in and the Indonesian official takes him on the freeway to his condo. On the freeway, the Nigerian admires the beautiful scenery. Once at the condominium, the Nigerian is impressed at how big the condo is: 5 rooms, 3 bathrooms, and much more that he was baffled about. There's a 2nd BMW parked outside.
The Nigerian official goes to the master bedroom and asks
"You are just a humble official, how do you have enough?"
The Indonesian official tells him to come to the window and asks, "What do you see outside?"
"Houses, apartments, and people."
"You see that freeway?” Rubs finger and thumb together. "I took 10%".
“Aha” winks the Nigerian. “Say no more”
Fast forward 3 months when the Indonesian official comes to Nigeria to return the visit. He arranges to meet his friend at the airport. The Nigerian official pulls up to the airport in a Lamborghini. The Indonesian official gets in and the Nigerian takes him. The Indonesian official is really excited, wanting to see the beautiful place Nigeria is. They drive and drive when suddenly the road turns into a muddy unpaved road going into the bush. Huts and children running around. The Indonesian official is shocked until they get to the Nigerian's place: a mansion in a beautiful clearing. The mansion is gorgeous, 35 bedrooms, completed with a slide to the pool from the 2nd floor to the 1st. Two Rolls Royces are parked outside
The Indonesian official goes to the master bedroom and checks the toilet, in disbelief. The toilet seat is pure gold.He then asks,
"You are just a humble official, how do you have enough?"
The Nigerian official tells him to come to the window, points at the jungle and asks,
"You see that freeway?"
“?”
Rubs finger and thumb together. "100%!"
I heard the same story about Argentina > 30 years ago
Never heard the joke but made a similar comparison between Chinese and Sun-Saharan African corruption more than once.
A large chunk of this post is about what's known as the "curb cut effect" - a lot of the time, when you design for people with disabilities, you make things better for everyone (or, at least, for an awful lot of other people without disabilities).
Level boarding, elevator access, curb cuts - also things like closed captions (very popular, especially with the currently fashionable mushy sound on TV and film) - all of these benefit a lot of users who aren't in any normal sense disabled. Audiobooks used to be something that existed only for a small number of blind readers: now we have a cheap distribution system and they are popular with all sorts of people.
The communication and teaching strategies required to teach neurodiverse kids are just good practice and would benefit anybody. My kid is neurodiverse (slight ASD, heavy ADHD) and I've completely changed my parenting approach. It's helped me take care of other kids with ease and even translated into better, more constructive relationships at work.
This is totally true, which makes Matt’s title and initial section that takes a tone suggesting a critical view of the ADA incredibly puzzling.
Halfway through the piece he abandons it completely and reveals that the basic problem is contracting barriers for public projects and the ADA is completely irrelevant to his thesis. Absent the ADA Amtrak would have exactly the same crappy facilities and would also not feel obligated to help parents of young children or people in wheelchairs, who presumably would simply not ride trains in most cases. Why spend the first paragraphs punching down?
These adversarial “solutions” often produce things that technically make it usable, but only in an emergency. Like a pedestrian bridge over the freeway that you have to go up three floors of ramps for, or a multi-elevator trip to the subway station through unventilated elevators filled with a combination of urine and cleaning product fumes, or a bus system that technically gets within a couple blocks of every point in town but only once an hour and on winding routes.
In all these cases, if access had been built in from the start, I’m sure a much better solution could have been arrived at, but it would require some sort of serious change to the project itself. Instead they just throw millions of dollars at it.
Too many lawyers and not enough engineers going into politics?
Yes, but I’d like to see Matt run this back to how the incentives for government projects and administration can be changed. With poorly designed incentives, you get the wrong skills and do the wrong things and you do those wrong things badly.
Do you have a plan to implement a national curriculum for public speaking in engineering schools?
That’s my answer, 100%
When I think of ADA, the first thing that comes to mind is a sleazy lawyer shaking down a small business because the bathroom grab handle is located two inches too low.
.... and that's a classic example of why adversarial legalism is a problem. If it was a normal inspection-and-regulation system, then the inspector would say "grab handle's too low, move it up two inches", you'd get a contractor in, move the handle, and that would be the end of it.
But then you'd have to hire and pay an army of inspectors--the reason we prefer leaving it up to the lawyers is that we don't have to pay them, they take their pound of flesh from the defendant when they win a case/settlement.
Indeed, and while lawyers may take a pound of flesh, they do it only occasionally. While inspectors would take an ounce hundred times for each pound that a lawyer would take.
> Indeed, and while lawyers may take a pound of flesh, they do it only occasionally.
That is explicitly not the case with the ADA. There are lawyers who make a living just suing everyone they can for violations https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/magazine/americans-with-disabilities-act.html
You're not required to prove you actually encountered any of these violations, just that they exist, so it's turned out to be pretty lucrative.
Interesting article. Thanks for sharing. I'm still not sure that the current costs are as high as it would be to have a legion of inspectors going around issuing fines and such, but much less certain of that than I was.
They’re certainly much less fairly distributed the way we do it. The costs of inspection are borne by society, and shouldn’t be too much more than the inspectors we already have. But forcing a business to go under for an honest mistake simply as a rent-seeking enterprise is messed up.
That would only work if someone asked the business to raise the grab handle two inches and the business refused. If they just raised the grab handle then a judge would throw out the case.
Not exactly. The way it works is that the lawyer can make the request, but the request can be dealt with by paying a settlement, no fixing anything required. That's the "sleazy" part.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/magazine/americans-with-disabilities-act.html
And it's been interesting to see the backlash to similar (albeit more extreme) "vigilante justice" solutions employed with abortion. The right learned from the left and then accelerated. It changed my view on this kind of approach in general.
Bathrooms are my favourite personally-relevant "a-commode-ation"; as much as it's a flippantly dismissive response to a deeply entrenched incentive status quo, "just make all bathrooms single stall unisex!" led to a lot of nice outcomes locally. It really is nice having more square footage to squat in, it's plenty of room for ADA grab bars and the like, more baby-changing stations (dads shop with kids too!), and - biggest single benefit for me - I never have to experience the degradation of urinals ever again. Yes, there are some aggregate tradeoffs vs. traditional sex-segregated designs, but each individual accommodation is strictly superior. (Although for the life of me, I will never understand why men leave the seat up in coed bathrooms. Social norms take time to catch up to physical reality.)
The converse of this principle: instead of special accommodations, disfavoured groups get anti-accommodations. I'm thinking of hostile architecture, those weird random bumps to deter skateboard grinding, etc. I think the same solution entails here as well: rather than making an exceptional punishment targeting a specific group, with spillover effects harming everyone else too, it'd be better to ask for __more__. Housing and shelter space for the homeless, skate parks for the Hawkish Tonys. There's only so much land to go around, but devoting too little of it to meet specific market demands inevitably means, the public commons gets used for those specialty purposes instead. To everyone's detriment. Scarcity mindset is bad, actually!
Henry is correct. Having only unisex bathrooms is inefficient and worse for everyone. As often we can learn from Scandinavia and other advanced countries. You don’t need unisex bathrooms for dads to have baby changing stations, just put some in the men’s bathrooms too! That’s the real feminist thing to do!
Truth is some women (and men!) don’t feel comfortable in unisex bathrooms. Moreover, they’re inefficient. Just compare the lines when you have separated bathrooms. Urinals make things go much faster. Cancelling them won’t help anyone but simply make things worse for all. And it’s not just about time either. Men can easily make a mess peeing in public toilets. Women would certainly not benefit from the arrangement.
In a big venue with a constant stream of bathroom users, you want some urinals to accommodate one common use-case quickly and efficiently. In a small venue where you get one or two or three random users with gaps between them, you want one or two unisex stalls, so that you can either cut down on costs by only supplying one, or so that a second person who has to go doesn’t have to wait if the previous person is coincidentally of the same sex.
"with a constant stream of bathroom users, you want some urinals""
Kenny, you're on the verge of being blocked for that comment. :-)
Agreed.
OTOH it is kind of ridiculous to have single-person restrooms segregated by sex--if there's only one person at a time (common in places like Starbucks), why should it matter which sex they are?
Because it allows the women's bathroom to be kept in nicer condition?
I worked as a janitor throughout college, and while the men's restrooms were generally dirtier, the women's restrooms seemed to have far more 'catastrophic situations'.
Make single occupant bathrooms contain a urinal and a toilet, maybe?
Most of the mess men make is from pissing everywhere when we don't have urinals.
I'll defer to your expertise, but I'll just offer the observation that, while I haven't been in many women's restrooms, every single one of them I've been in has had doors on ALL the stalls and seats on ALL the toilets, which makes them infinitely superior to probably 10% of the men's restrooms I've been in, and that's not even talking about the availability of furniture (particularly couches), moisturizer, (fake) flowers, special mirrors, special lighting, and other features I've observed over the years in women's restrooms that I've never observed in a men's restroom.
Unironically I think this is kind of the rationale, either implicit or explicit. I think everyone expects that *on average* you're going to end up with at least one bathroom relatively cleaner--specifically, the women's room--if you have single sex single-occupancy bathrooms. Depending on local bathroom traffic conditions and occupancy rates this might be a decent equilibrium because the alternative from a practical user experience perspective is less "same amount of filth, divided by two" and more "two filthy and unpleasant bathrooms instead of one."
I don't really have a strong opinion on policy here, but I think there's probably some actual non-zero substance to the single-sex single-occupancy position, although I imagine that many won't find it a particularly compelling one.
What do you mean by "weird random bumps to deter skateboard grinding"? I hope you're not referring to the orderly rows of bumps on wheelchair ramps that are for the benefit of the blind, so they are not confused by the lack of curb.
No, these:
https://www.landscapearchitecture.com/landarchspecs/images/skatestoppers1.png
Skateboarders gonna skateboard, if you don't install these, the low edges of concrete ledges are going to get destroyed.
Interesting. Definitely not random, though. Better to have skateparks with custom designed structures for skateboarding.
Even with skate parks, skateboarders are still liable to grind up on those edges when they're in transition.
The degradation of urinals lol. Please explain...
Yeah the efficiency of urinals vs stalls is massive. I can only imagine the horrors of stadiums at half-time under this system.
Urinals are also preferable at bars etc because you don’t need to touch anything.
Efficient for a bit under half the population, some of the time. (Not that I haven't experienced the horrors of attempted solid waste disposal in a urinal...) I'd actually be curious to see hard data on that. Since one will always require some number of stalls, the cleaning requirements differ (splashback...aim lower!), realistically dudes always leave at least 1 urinal between themselves and every other guy...and so on. I think there's also a lot to be said for not making going such a brutally-utilitarian experience. Tastefully pleasant bathrooms used at a sedate pace are rare socially-acceptable islands of tranquility in an otherwise mad gyre of frenetic activity. There are reasons beyond strict biology why women take longer! It's one of the only times I ever get to sit down at my job, lol. Urinals didn't even grant that small mercy.
Level boarding does seem like a "strictly better", at least. Not just for rolling bags and ADA, but also for bikes and scooters, strollers, kids and other short folks...and people wearing high heels. (I can imagine an entire tedious-gap-analysis campaign based around Poor Accessibility Disproportionately Harms Women based on this factoid alone, the ads write themselves. Public Transit, more like Patriarchy Transit. First the Male Gaze forces us to prioritize dangerously inefficient footwear, then it coerces car culture due to non-level boarding...)
>realistically dudes always leave at least 1 urinal between themselves and every other guy
Obviously, if there are multiple urinals free, people will leave gaps but I have never seen someone wait to use a urinal just to avoid standing directly next to someone else. Urinals in airports, sporting events, and movie theaters are frequently packed to the gills.
Yes, grandparent comment displays some major "I have never gone to the bathroom at halftime" energy.
Taking it a step further--the Metrodome had troughs. When they tore it down and the Twins/Gophers/Vikings got new stadiums, we got urinals. Noticeably longer wait times. RIP troughs :(
"I sincerely miss a specific aspect of the Dome" is an **incredibly** niche comment, and I salute you.
"I'd actually be curious to see hard data on that."
I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but, based on my multi-decades long observation of every concert venue, airport, or other place I've been where there are surges in bathroom use, I'd be willing to wager an extremely large sum of money that a properly constructed study would verify that a bathroom with 50-50 urinals and stalls has a higher throughput than a bathroom with the same number of waste receptacles but 100% are stalls.
The basic point here is correct but I'm struggling to see why any of these train station problems show that "adversarial legalism" is so weird. The ADA just creates a floor. Yes it doesn't solve every problem, but the floor is an incentive to seek more elegant solutions. Sometimes society does that successfully: there have been all kinds of general innovations in accessible technology over the years. Sometimes it doesn't, and where people stubbornly resist innovation for one reason or another, that's when you see examples like the Union Station thing. But there's nothing weird about that. Creating that "weirdness" is precisely how you get people to find general solutions. It's not for nothing that the adversarially legal US is, on the whole, better on accessibility than its non-adversarial Western counterparts, and not just because those countries tend to have older stuff.
Matt's got this whole Thing about adversarial legalism that comes out in drips and drabs, like this post, but hasn't yet put the whole fleshed-out theory into one coherent post. To my best understanding, the context here is like a bigger version of "can lead a horse to water, but can't make it drink"...adversarial legalism creates roundabout incentive structures that reward CYA, such as special ADA accommodations, rather than tackling object-level problems like improving accessibility for everyone. Which would ultimately lead to a better equilibrium, since a better product/service means more people of all kinds will use it (= revenues, political support), rather than lack of a costly accommodation deterring mostly marginal customers. (I suppose that's an unintended pun, marginal in the leftist sense and also in the economics sense...) But, yes, there's still some missing pieces between there and the conclusion that AL is one of the Seven Deadly Policy Sins. Implied, but not made explicit.
The classic rebuttal to "actually USA #1 despite costly X" is that we're so much richer than other countries, we can afford to set vast piles of money on fire and still end up ahead. This does not necessarily imply that X ought to be costly, or the costliness of X isn't detrimental/inefficient. E.g. healthcare: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2018/11/19/why-everything-you-know-about-healthcare-is-wrong-in-one-million-charts-a-response-to-noah-smith/
I too would like to see this more fleshed out. My most upvoted mailbag question [https://www.slowboring.com/p/matts-mailbox-d5f/comment/8110600] was curious about Matt's disdain for the legal field, and perhaps to little surprise it was ducked.
I guess I'm still not getting it.
To be more specific, I get how "adversarial legalism" doesn't solve problems as well as "tackling object-level problems" does. What I don't get it is why those two things are in opposition to each other. Creating a floor through adversarial legalism, if anything, would seem to incentivize tackling object-level problems - maybe that's not the case, I don't hold to that strongly, but even if it's not so, I can't see any way that the former would *discourage* the latter. It's really a "why not both" situation.
I don’t see why this is true. It’s quite possible for the US to be richer than other countries despite (rather than because of) seemingly economically harmful policies - and it’s a more sensible explanation.
This heuristic makes sense for major things like energy policy or the healthcare system but for things like how ADA is implemented it’s not realistic to think even a terrible version of it is going to impoverish the country.
This is akin to, "Tampa Bay won the Super Bowl therefor they _must_ have the best running backs, the best quarterback, the best wide receivers, the best tight ends, the best defensive (and offensive) lines and the best kickers."
Major defensive back erasure here!
Yes, the references to legal adversarialism here seem a little stray. It almost feels like the article started off with an idea that ADA is an example of the problems of "legal adversarialism", but that thesis foundered on the realization that the main shortcoming with ADA isn't how it's enforced (ie, private lawsuits rather than administrative actions), but with the actual legal standard that ADA sets, regardless of how it's enforced, that does not require more than reasonable accommodation. And that's significantly a function of factors external to the ADA, such as high construction costs.
I think there’s some issue with what adversarial legalism can actually create. It can create patches on top. It can’t create thoughtful design from the start.
This sort of depends on how effective you think that the deterrent effect of tort law is. I think most legal scholars these days would argue that the real value of tort is in the ex ante incentives it creates rather than the ex-post results of nominally "making people whole." This is absolutely the dominant view of the benefits of class action suits for damages, in which no one pretends that $15 your'e not actually going to claim 5 or 10 years after the fact is a meaningful remedy to the members of the class, but the expense of the suit is believed to have a meaningful deterrent effect on would-be defendants and that's where the social value is created (in theory).
In practice, the Anglo-American legal system is just flat out bad at dealing with at least mass torts and always has been, it's just that such torts used to be less common because the scale of the tortfeasors was smaller. When it comes to things that affect more than a few tens of potential plaintiffs at once, your best options are likely to be either competition and the profit motive or else pure prescriptive legislation, especially for anything path-dependent.
Because it siphons off energy from a broader reform agenda to specific legal rabbit holes that probably aren’t all that great from a utilitarian cost benefit analysis. Instead of having to make really broad trade offs to include the marginalized everywhere we just get narrowly tailored lawsuits which prioritize highly specialized trade offs at really high costs.
I see this a ton in education where we just keep piling up bandaids on serious problems and it’s missing the big picture.
Eh, I'm not feeling a lot of explanatory weight in "energy."
Yeah but the circles of "being ADA compliant" and "accommodating disabled people" don't completely overlap.
“Right now the government, sadly, has lost any sense of urgency about developing next-generation Covid-19 vaccines that could target multiple variants at once and block transmission by putting defenses in our noses. Better vaccines would reduce Covid-19 just by virtue of being better. But better vaccines would also be more widely used, so the social efficacy of superior vaccines would be dramatically higher.”
This is a very interesting use of resources for something which is likely to converge with the lethality of the other common cold strains over the next half-generation or so.
Maybe it passes muster from a cost-benefit analysis in isolation, but set against all the other demands on our research funding, I think not. I’d rather be spending more money on a universal flu vaccine against the day when a really bad recombinant event gives us a *real* pandemic to worry about, among other things.
Sorry, but you’re assuming it’s going to “ converge with the lethality of the other common cold strains ” based on what? Every expert I read repeatedly says there is no way to know where the virus is going in terms of lethality. It could get better or *worse*, and if it stays roughly the same we are projected with at least 100k extra deaths every year in the states for years to come. When COVID started that kind of number seemed unbelievably horrifying. And all this without counting long COVID or simply the economic damage from all the extra time off work from a new perennial pathogen that you can get repeatedly 2–3 times a year, perhaps more. New, better vaccines from covid are an extremely important priority. Some of these btw, such as pan coronavirus vaccines, may well anticipate another pandemic (COVID is the third lethal coronavirus in the last generation). It goes without saying that other pharmaceutical developments should also be supported, but next gen covid interventions should definitely be top priority. It’s a totally no brainer.
> Every expert I read repeatedly says there is no way to know where the virus is going in terms of lethality.
You're both right. My understanding is that pretty much everyone agrees it will land on cold level lethality on a *long enough timeline*, not sure how consensus "half-generation" is. But until it lands there, things could definitely get worse
"Sorry, but you’re assuming it’s going to 'converge with the lethality of the other common cold strains' based on what?"
I can't speak for David R., but I assume that based on what we can rationally infer about the history of diseases: mutations in highly communicable diseases must on average trend toward being less lethal over time because, if the opposite were true, then the past few hundred thousand years of co-evolution of diseases with humans or near-humans (since great apes can catch many types of human diseases, I have to presume Neanderthals, etc. could too) would have already produced some sort of disease with a large zoonotic reservoir, the transmissibility of measles, and lethality of Ebola. It makes far more sense to presume COVID-19 will follow the pattern we can infer every other disease followed than to believe that we're living in an era where a disease breaks that ironclad trend.
Not sure I understand you. Do you mean to say that a highly-transmissable, highly-lethal disease is not possible?
Also, there are two fallacies in your analysis. 1. the human-animal interaction is getting more and more entangled in manner that has not at all been consistent in the past few hundred years. 2. even if you are correct about the "long term" (decades? generations?) this does not at all negate the danger of a short and medium term lethal strain the covld wipe out a few extra millions or god forbid more than that before we reach that equilibrium. That does, in fact, have ample precedent, including in relatively recent (20th cent.) history. The world today is far more prone to high transmissibility , and covid is currently hosted and transmitted by a record number of people, and is mutating at astounding pace.
I mean a highly-transmissible, highly-lethal disease is possible as a "novel" disease coming from a zoonotic source, but that once one arises subsequent mutations will on average make it less lethal over time.
Which is why smallpox never existed ?
Um, yes, smallpox exists and it's believed to have evolved less lethal variants over time: https://www.news-medical.net/health/Smallpox-Evolution.aspx
Again, though, it seems already that the primary mediating factor here has almost nothing to do with the viruses in question, and almost everything to do with human immune responses.
That's not to say "we're home free", but it is to say that "mutating at an astounding pace" is not some unexpected, immensely threatening concept. It's *the norm for all endemic respiratory viruses,* which still kill very few people. The only exception to this rule is, as I mention elsewhere, the flu, which is far too capable of recombination across multi-species strains for anyone to ever feel safe.
I feel like you and I have had this *exact* discussion, but the synopsis is that there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that all the coronaviruses which today cause common colds made the leap from zoonotic reservoirs to humans in a similar fashion, causing a pandemic.
At this point there much more evidence suggesting that the Russian Flu of 1889 was caused by a coronavirus originally found in cow herds in Central Asia than any strain of the flu. That virus today causes mild cold symptoms; it's still closely related to the original, it mutates fairly rapidly as does COVID, and we've not done anywhere near enough population survey work to understand how widely it spreads each winter, but the answer seems to be "very".
If that theory is broadly accurate, and I think it is, then the lethality of one of these viruses is not mediated mainly by its own evolution into a state that makes it less deadly to humans. It is instead mediated mostly or entirely by humanity's accumulation of an effective immune memory and long-term immune response to that virus in all of its guises and strains, such that even new mutations cause only mild symptoms in the vast majority of people.
Those long-term immune processes are simply not good enough or quick enough to prevent people from getting sick entirely, but they're more than sufficient to see off the threat quickly after a mild illness.
The other half of the equation is that everything I've read says there's likely no way to get the body to generate durable short-term immunity (permanent presence of antibodies, etc) to a coronavirus. We can be infected by an identical strain of common cold coronavirus less than six months after recovering from it.
So the single most needed measure is a bivalent COVID-and-flu-strains-du-jour vaccine for each fall, and that's it. Normalize the damned thing so much that at least the same 65% of people who get an annual flu vaccine do this as well. Nothing much better is likely achievable, and even a universal coronavirus vaccine would produce an immune response lasting a few months.
Given that reality, I'd rather spend our limited funds on something else, both because that something else is likely to be more valuable over a longer timeframe in its own right, and because the "holy grail" of a "good" vaccine is likely unachievable and failure will give the COVID nuts another handle to regain more purchase in our public discourse, which is a terrible outcome that should be avoided at all costs.
Is there any additional evidence about the 1889 pandemic since the time Matt wrote about it here? I would love to know what it really was, and the coronavirus theory is so tempting, but not obviously *that* strongly supported.
Someone did the gene-sequencing work to link the existing strain of coronavirus back to the bovine variety and figured out that they diverged around 1890, give or take a few years; I believe there was also a paper that claimed to rule out the originally mooted strain of flu.
There's something of an effort to go through all the dusty biology department and museum of natural history samples and find some actual samples from that pandemic for testing to see if we can figure that out once and for all.
Not sure what else, what I read when following up on his article was compelling enough to be pretty sold on this, so haven't really interrogated the concept further.
Yeah I had seen all that (except the possible paper ruling out a strain of flu? I recall papers saying symptoms were a bit unusual for flu but not ruling out) actually even before his article and thought it was very suggestive, but not a slam dunk.
I guess no victims of that pandemic were buried in known places under the permafrost like the 1918 victims in Svalbard.
A lot fewer dead and the administrative capacity of the couple states where that might have happened advanced by leaps and bounds between 1890 and 1918, so that's much less likely.
The yawning difference in lethality between 1890 and 1918 is actually one of the things which tells me, "Screw a universal coronavirus vaccine, put whatever money is necessary into a universal flu vaccine, even if it's still an annual one!"
The difference in fatality rates between the two under approximately equal standards of widely available medical care should be *terrifying* to anyone with a sense of history.
So I read similar things. However that’s basically where the 100k deaths in the coming years is coming from. The immunity stage may take a decade or much longer and won’t work for the current elderly. Think of the total damage in the meantime. And that’s in a moderately optimistically scenario assuming a more lethal variant doesn’t come along, which all agree is totally possible and is basically a roll of the dice.(moderately optimistic - because a less lethal development is also possible, but I think it’s wrong to consider the two as cancelling out).
However - pancorona vaccines are critical not to prevent infection but serious illness. As I alluded to in the previous comment, there is every reason to believe another serious corona virus may come along — we had sars, mers and COVID in the past 20 years!— and being protected from it is very worth while ! Also reducing severe outcomes from all potential variants of COVID (i.e. the entirely possible bad scenario that can literally happen at any moment and will continue to hang over us like Damocles sword for the next decade) is equally worthwhile. By contrast to protection from infection, protection from severe outcomes lasts.
Finally, experts seem to believe that nasal vaccine may actually be effective in preventing infection in the long term, so that’s definitely worth developing!
A universal coronavirus vaccine ain't a bad idea, but let's not get too wrapped up in the idea of preparing for the last war. It was blind fucking luck that the family of viruses currently most exposed to humans and closest to the evolutionary leap that allowed them to infect us was a coronavirus and not something else.
What's true of coronaviruses causing common cold symptoms is presumably also true of all the rhinoviruses and adenoviruses, so it's very likely they all started this way at some point in the dusty annals of history or pre-history.
I've read stuff either way on the IN vaccines so we'll see. But that's just it, they're already in stage 2 (and maybe some in stage 3?) trials, what more funding do you want?
If they work well they'll end up as the frontline vaccines before long.
Well, you need to start from somewhere, and contrary to what you and many insist on saying, the war isn't over. It shifted from the initial emergency phase, yes, but over it is not. 100k excess death in each of the coming years (whihc is , mind you far, *less* than what we had thus far) courtesy of a new top-ten cause of mortality is not "over" by any sane measure.
So yes, starting there sounds like a very good idea, and I bet the technological and scientific breakthroughs involved will then be applicable to numerous other diseases and fields. Starting there doesn't mean stopping there, but not starting there doesn't make sense to me.
Which then begs the question, again, what more funding do you want?
Matt of all people ought to understand that we’re now in Secret Congress territory. There’s plenty of money and plenty of research ongoing. Probably more than indicated by the long-term threat level relative to the flu and others.
Where are 65% getting the flu shot? More like 50% (in the US at least). And I’ll be interested to see how the experience with the Covid vaccine changed those numbers. Wouldn’t surprise me to see it drop as people are coming to terms with the ineffectiveness of the Covid jabs.
And don’t we have pretty good reason to believe that Covid isn’t going to be stacked on top of other seasonal illnesses? Maybe risk goes up a little, maybe the number of times you call in sick goes up a little, but there’s good evidence for cross-immunity with other coronaviruses, plus there’s the strange viral competition mechanism where only one of a family of viruses is dominant in the environment at any given time...It isn’t well understood, but there’s lots of empirical evidence for it. (A exhibit A - Flu disappeared around the world for 2 years - and not just in places that were locked down)
Global average in the countries where available.
Anyway, the rest of this is obliquely agreeing with me, it seems?
I'd love to see a post on why the federal government isn't doing more here. I doubt it's just the technical challenge. Do they substantively think it's not a good plan? Have they just prioritized other things? Do they reflexively not want to do the same thing as the Trump administration did?
I think the scale of all problems is so huge, that people just psychologically give up. Why is the cost of putting elevators so high in mass transit stations? Well, that is likely a mixture of political, corporate and union corruption. When you see monumentally bad decisions occurring time after time, you can but shrug your shoulders.
Also, the only people still talking about Covid-19 on Twitter are the covid forever and covid denialist people. Everyone else has moved on. Biden needs to shut up about vaccinations.
Edit: I should have been clearer that it is covid vaccination I was referring to.
No. Urging people to get up date with their vaccinations is still good advice and the cost of giving it is low.
Something like...a bit over...30%? of US adults have gotten the old booster. Clearly not the revealed preference of the majority. To the extent that politicians ought to prioritize popularism over base appeals/mobilization delusion, the cost might be low, but the alternative could be higher and chase a bigger payout too. Maybe. (Of course, renewing the Public Health Emergency just sends even more mixed signals...especially strange for a supposedly-over pandemic?)
That's just political calculus, not public health, but we've certainly seen now how the former affects the latter over the last few years...
I'd hope that sometime in the future, "up to date" won't mean "got the latest out-of-date too-late-to-capture-majority-of-benefits booster". It's probably still net good advice, but given that one is still required to take the other OG vaxx shots before the new booster, the audience is smaller than one would think...
Just FYI, the booster now on offer is in fact optimized for the variant that is still currently causing some 90% of cases. It’s unbelievably up-to-date and sadly underrated.
It's weird. First the dithering about whether to update boosters and thane when they did, the roll it out in such a low key way. Why not "Flash! updated booster is finally here! Get yours ASAP!" I got mine becasue Zeynep Tufekci wrote about it. What happened to public service advertising like "Just say no!"
I wasn't gonna reply to any replies, but this one's been bothering me a lot. I *specifically* meant the same as Matt does in this post: https://www.slowboring.com/p/were-getting-an-omicron-optimized
Perhaps that's a take you disagreed with too, I don't know. But it's not at all unreasonable to notice that we had the pieces in place for the new booster for several months, and the release mostly got pushed back for...what? Dotting all the t's and crossing all the i's for the FDA and other conservative (risk-averse) gatekeepers, maybe? No one will ever know the full story, I guess...but in the meantime, thousands more got seriously ill and died that didn't have to. That, to me and many others, is pretty upsetting and disappointing. People die, that's what they do, but it's extra bad when it's seemingly easily preventable.
That's what I mean when I say being too late to capture the majority of benefits...at this later point we're looking at at least 3 competitive Omicron sub-variants that all display significant immune evasion. Just in time for holiday gatherings, flu season, and new winter waves. The booster will still help, but...imagine if we coulda had a fresh booster not that long after the Dec-Feb megawaves. Perhaps then people would care more, and adoption wouldn't be in the single-to-low double digits. (Places with higher uptake I'd expect to already be highly 3-vaxxed, so the marginal benefit is smaller.) Things have just been too normal for too long now, few outside Twitter etc. care strongly anymore*. It doesn't matter if you have a perfect vaccine when no one bothers to take it :(
(To be explicit, it's specifically the "Just FYI/is in fact" that struck me as unnecessarily rude. People can have different valid conclusions despite knowing the same set of facts. They don't have to be ignorant...and I am not. On this anyway.)
*Midterms polling on "what do you think are the top X issues facing America?" type questions have been consistently showing covid...like...not even top20. Beaten out by abortion, immigration, climate change, inflation, Ukraine...
“…underrated”
How do you know?
A recent editorial by a member of the FDA’s Vaccine Advisory Committee noted,
“…Moderna recently published a study on the clinical efficacy of the bivalent vaccine containing BA.1. Sixteen cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections occurred: 11 in the bivalent group and five in the monovalent group. For those who suffered clinical illness, five were in the bivalent group and one in the monovalent group. In other words, although the numbers were small, the monovalent vaccine performed better than the bivalent vaccine.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/cdc-oversells-the-bivalent-covid-shot-hospitalizations-vaccine-booster-omicron-pandemic-pfizer-moderna-china-illness-death-11663793472
Which margin is this on? Bivalent v monovalent as the 5th shot? Bi v Mono on wherever the person is: 1st, 2nd, 3rd ,4th ,5th?
“…second booster in adults who had previously received a two-dose (100-μg) primary series and first booster (50-μg) dose of mRNA-1273 (≥3 months earlier)”
Here’s the paper:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2208343
What's the downside of saying you really ought to get vaccinated?
Annoying people who are tired of constantly hearing it.
:)
It is objectively harder to put elevators into a completed building than to build them as part of the original structure, especially when that building is old and made of brick and stone and stuff and used by thousands of people every day.
The scale of problems today is much smaller than in, say, 1840, when a working family spend the majority of its wages on food and a war or bad harvest could cause malnutrition. And yet the men of 1840 ended up advancing our species past 200,000 years of preindustrial squalor.
Yeah this is so wrong in so many ways. “The men” of 1840 didn’t start from scratch, to use an understatement of , well, historic, proportions. The men who made the advances were also rarely if ever in risk of malnutrition*… and needless to say, there was plenty of squalor both before and after 1840 but that’s hardly the sum of the world at any point in history.
*you may however argue that the famous 19th cent. men who advanced the species were not an island but part of an economy and society of the men AND women of 1840 who gave them the means to get there. The perennial debate about the role of the individual in history.
I don't understand how you think his underlying point is wrong. The problems people had in 1840s, even wealthy people, were typically far in excess of modern people simply because technology (especially medical!) has advanced so far.
Yep, but now we’re rich and comfortable. Someone get Ross Douthat in here to make his point
On the subject of accommodations, I’m not usually a ‘government waste’ guy, but shouldn’t the feds do some serious soul searching about this insane Havana Syndrome fiasco?
At a minimum it seems highly inappropriate that we gave hundreds of thousands to individuals on the basis of a conspiracy theory. More narrowly, it seems like there need to be some real changes at the CIA. Now only were their own personnel among the “victims” of Havana Syndrome, the Agency validated the theory! It’s even more ludicrous (though more anodyne) than Hussein’s WMDs!
Somehow (I think because of the parallels to Long COVID or some Trump drama), Havana syndrome got left-right coded, but it really shouldn’t be. It’s worth getting to the bottom of how the entire foreign policy wing of the government lost their minds on this.
There are plenty of syndromes that we are supposed to pay attention to though there are no organic medical ways of confirming them. Havana Syndrome is just one more added to a list of Chronic Fatige, chronic Lyme, fibromyalgia, probably long COVID.....
I suspect that all of these are different names for essentially the same thing. I've seen enough reasonably well-adapted physically fit people go into severe declines with something like this not to believe there is something to it, though whether that something is a physical disease or a psychological condition is one that I'm not qualified to answer (and, even if it is psychological, that doesn't mean you don't need to treat it physically).
Well yes, for instance people with pseudoseizures don't necessarily know they have them.
Which side did it get left-right coded on? I’ve seen both sides of the claim in my media diet, which is pretty left, and have no idea how it’s discussed on the right.
I think the correct axis of comparison is pro vs. anti natsec establishment rather than left vs. right
I think there are several things going on.
The first is that it's mainly affecting people who are smart and think of themselves as smart. People who are smart often think they're immune to motivated reasoning/falling for conspiracy theories and others think they're immune to that kind of thinking, so there's a tendency to decide they must be right.
Secondly, it's considered bad form to doubt people in national security positions when it comes to things like this. We can say they got it all wrong when it came to Saddam Hussein's alleged WMDs, but doubting what they're saying about what caused their symptoms is in poor taste.
Finally, psychogenic conditions are stereotyped as feminine. They are more common in women but men can get them too. They're also regarded as something that people with poor mental health get Havana Syndrome is happening to the kind o people who are stereotyped as tough and manly so there is going to be a ton of pushback against the idea that people in national security are suffering from psychogenic illness because that's something teenage girls get. The mental health aspect is also important because having a mental health condition can endanger your security clearance.
It's probably easier to go along with the sonic weapon explanation rather than suggesting that it's psychogenic.
I've seen many situations where ADA has led to some strange outcomes due to the "adversarial legalism" discussed here. Take handicapped parking spaces at hiking trails, for instance. What's supposed to be accommodations for the disabled effectively amounts to a perk given to spouses or parents of the disabled, where if they want to go hiking at a popular trailhead, they don't need to leave as early as everybody else to find parking. Of all the ways government can help the disabled, this type of perk feels exceedingly strange. Yet, it's commonplace, perhaps because the trailhead restroom is technically considered a "public building" in the eyes of the law, never mind that it's always dirty and smelly, and handicapped people driving by have much better places to stop in and use the bathroom.
The transit system is another example. In the aftermath of the 2008 recession, a transit agency near me removed all Sunday service for several years; they justified it by the fact that it was operationally efficient; not running regular buses on Sunday meant the feds would allow them to not run paratransit on Sunday either. Under the law, running regular buses without special ADA paratransit buses is considered a big no-no, but not running any buses at all, so that all transit riders have to suffer together, the law says that's ok. In fact, there even exists some exurban/rural transit systems where ADA paratransit is their *only* service, and your ability to ride the bus anywhere at all requires being disabled. Again, this is what happens when well-meaning laws come with twisted incentive structures. If the federal government really wants transit to be accessible to the disabled, they should provide money to help pay for it (carrots), rather than arbitrary rules that force small agencies to cut all other service to accommodate it (sticks).
"Something that a lot of people who I like and respect are probably too good at is explaining why this or that problem can’t be solved because of dysfunctional contracting relationships or bad labor unions or whatever.
What I always want to say in response is that while of course these problems would’ve been solved already if they were easy to solve, I reject the idea that they are genuinely unsolvable."
I cannot endorse this statement and subsequent follow up enough. It might be at the core as to why I consider myself a left of center person. Namely, problems, no matter how intractable, can be solved and solutions often involve some sort of government action, even if that action is literally removing government from the equation (i.e. zoning reform).
I give this anecdote a lot, but it really speaks to my worldview (and the sentiments above). My mother told me back in 2008 there was three things she was 100% sure would not happen in her lifetime when I was born in 1983; fall of the Berlin wall, peace in Northern Ireland and election of a black President. In retrospect, these events may not look that shocking when we look back at some basic facts of recent history (the economic structure of the Soviet Union was doomed to fail once oil prices fell, Americans views on race have slowly but surely become more accepting over time since the 60s etc.). But in 1983, you could have won a lot of money betting on one of these three things happening let alone all three.
My point is, I just fundamentally reject the idea that problems can't solved. As sort of of a coda to this sentiment, I remember thinking maybe 6 months ago why is that of all the people on twitter, why is it Megan McCardle boils my blood the most. There are certainly countless number of people way more terrible or odious in about a thousand different ways on twitter. But I realized its because she more than anyone I can think of (with exception of maybe certain very lefty environmentalists), is a complete cynic about the ability of anything to change for the better and most especially that government can be an agent of change for the better. And I just fundamentally reject that premise.
Do you believe there are categories of problems that government cannot solve? Do you believe there are categories of problems that other entities can better solve than government can?
Odd, one of the reasons why I've really enjoyed Megan McArdle's work over the years is very much pointing out the daunting challenges of solving problems. Reading her work in isolation (like anyone else) isn't good, but when read in conjunction with others I've found her work quite useful.
There a number of people I don't read precisely because they are charlatans/cranks/or lunatics. My point is I read Megan, because she is not that and does make some reasonable points about as you say "the daunting challenges of solving problems". I think for me the more I read her, the more I realized that this is her default viewpoint on...everything. It's a form of extreme cynicism and what I call "the politics of giving up". Again, I noted there is a similar strain on the environmental left. But it became exhausting to me to realize she takes these not as challenges to overcome, but impenetrable barriers.
I should also say, I got especially annoyed at her higher education musings. With a last name of "Chaudhuri" you can imagine I've taken a bit of a personal interest in these battles about school admissions/Affirmative Action/Higher education affordability. She basically defended "legacy" admissions by saying this is the way smart working and middle class people should get jobs. And then she basically off handedly noted that she had terrible grades but good test scores and got into Penn because of the scores. Given the time period she went to college, it seems extremely clear to me she's leaving out a key part of the story; namely she likely had family help getting in. My point, it's easy to be an extreme cynic of changing the status quo when you've benefitted tremendously from the status quo. I dunno, the whole thing just really rubbed me the wrong way and colored my opinion of her writing.
Is it possible that many (though not all) of these problems are downstream of the fact that we have an astoundingly slow legal system? How much of an outlier are we in that regard?
I think about this a lot when I see those little curb cut ramps off the sidewalk into a crosswalk: sued into existence for wheelchair users, but really so nice for strollers, the elderly, or when you’re pulling a suitcase...
It’s frustrating how many sidewalks don’t have them! If sidewalks were built by cities, they would be able to be rolled out in a generation as sidewalks are repaired. But with the system we have where each stretch of sidewalk has a different owner, and it takes lawsuits to force an owner to come up to code, we end up with an unusable mishmash in many smaller towns. (And parts of big cities, like Los Angeles.)
> But with the system we have where each stretch of sidewalk has a different owner,
My "favorite" consequence of this are all the sidewalks to nowhere. Each new subdivision that gets built adds a little stretch of sidewalk on the main road, but then none of them are connected!
I also see a lot of sidewalks to nowhere within subdivisions. The street has no sidewalk, except for in front of one isolated house, where it does.
Still, these sidewalks to nowhere are not completely useless. If you're walking down the street and happen to be walking by one when a car comes up, they give you space to pull off the road and let the car go by. I suppose that's something.
I can't speak for any other city, but in Denver curb cuts *are* put into existing sidewalks by the city because it's responsible for maintaining curbs; property owners are just responsible for sidewalks.
See the "Curbs and Gutters" dropdown here: https://www.denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Offices/Agencies-Departments-Offices-Directory/Department-of-Transportation-and-Infrastructure/Programs-Services/Street-Maintenance
And "Pedestrian Ramps" here: https://www.denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Offices/Agencies-Departments-Offices-Directory/Department-of-Transportation-and-Infrastructure/Programs-Services/Street-Maintenance/Ramps-Curbs-Gutters
Oh, is *that* why the sidewalks are such a mess in the US? Here, the pavement is part of the right of way, which means it gets repaired or changed or whatever by the council.
Legally, in the UK, in some streets the homeowner's property comes to the centreline of the road and in others it stops at the boundary between their property (ie their drive / front garden) and the pavement (and the local council owns the road and pavement), but that is only relevant if the right of way ceases to be adopted by the council; for as long as it is adopted, the council is responsible for maintaining and cleaning it, but also has the right to change the layout (e.g. putting in a cycle or bus lane) and never needs to refer to the landowner for permission.
If it's unadopted, then the landowner is legally responsible for the maintenance of the entire right of way (both the roadway and the pavement). This is expensive, so new developments have to make sure the council will adopt the new roads - sometimes this involves a substantial payment to the council in exchange for adoption.
That makes a lot more sense. Every time there's a snowstorm in a major US city, I see friends on Facebook talking about shoveling out their sidewalk. It seems weird to me that the street is done by the city, while the sidewalk is done by the property owners. The only justification I can see is that the city has big street-sized sweepers that can do the streets, while sidewalks are done with shovels, and shoveling work is more efficient when it is done in a distributed way by many individuals. But that just raises the question, why doesn't the city have sidewalk-sized sweepers?!
Many US cities do have sidewalk snow plows. I reckon the common imposition of sidewalk snow-removal obligations on property owners is a mixture of path dependence (these ordinances have been on the books a long time, and there's no compelling reason to remove them), practicality (it helps get sidewalks cleared more quickly) and budgetary (the sidewalk plowing budget doesn't need to be so large).
There's a Law Review article idea I've had kicking around in my head for a while about how sidewalk-clearing obligations probably have a lot of practical utility but nevertheless seem conceptually like 13th amendment violations. I just have a hard time distinguishing them from something like the corvee system in principle even though obviously there's a big gulf in practice.
There's not really a meaningful sense in which an urban sidewalk is anything but public property that private owners are forced to provide upkeep for.
I don't see how they would be a 13th Amendment violation: you're not required to clean the sidewalk yourself, just to make sure it's been cleared. (I'm not an expert on 13th Amendment law, but my very strong impression is that if you can pay a third party to perform the task for you, it's not going to be considered a 13th Amendment violation.)
Sweepers?!
I can't begin to wrap my head around what the expense would be to make snow clearance on sidewalks a municipal responsibility! (In Denver, the city doesn't even plow most *streets* except when there's been a really huge snow storm and it isn't expected to melt quickly enough.)
If the city doesn't plow the street, then why should anyone clear the sidewalk? If they do plow the street, then they can plow the sidewalk at the same time.
"If the city doesn't plow the street, then why should anyone clear the sidewalk?"
I'm assuming you're trolling at this point, but:
(1) so you can walk on the sidewalk yourself without trudging through snow;
(2) so you don't get sued by someone else who slips and falls on your uncleared walk;
(3) in many municipalities, you can theoretically be ticketed if you don't clear your sidewalk within a certain time of snowfall ending (typically 24 hours). That's rarely enforced, but still is an extra motivator.
"If they do plow the street, then they can plow the sidewalk at the same time."
Um, no? Cleaning sidewalks would take dramatically more manpower than cleaning streets -- a single truck with a plow can go down a street at probably 10 to 25 MPH depending on traffic, width, and speed limits; there's no way a small plow going down a sidewalk is going to be able to get anywhere near that speed.
It varies a lot by locality, and also individual lots within, in the US. In my own city, some sidewalks are in the public right of way and some aren't. Some that aren't are deliberately designed as such--often an easement will be agreed upon so that the general public can use it for its intended purpose, but the private owners can use trespassing law to prevent vagrancy there.
This, of course, can go bad. As a cyclist, it always frustrates me when new developments regularly cede public corridors for motorist traffic, but not for non-motorist corridors, which often end up as HOA property. Some HOAs are cool with non-resident traffic coming through (or again, they agree to an easement for that purpose), but some gate those off, leaving non-motorists to fend for themselves on the motorist corridors.
If the sidewalk isn't in the public right of way, then what stops the homeowner from removing it entirely?
Ah, the easement, I see. In the UK you can't do that: by law, any such easement would create a public right of way, though not an adopted one (once there is a public right of way, you can't block it, though you're not obliged to maintain the surface unless it's adopted).
If the easement is limited to certain persons, that's different, but one that grants the general public the right to cross the land *is* a public right of way, though the highways authority (the council) would only be obliged to maintain it if it is adopted.
The UK has a four-way distinction:
Private land that people can't travel on (except via the right to roam, which is a whole other subject, but basically means that open land that isn't planted with crops can be crossed by the public; this doesn't create a right of way because there isn't a specific route)
Permissive route, ie the landowner permits access but reserves the right to take it away again. This must be clearly signed or it becomes a public right of way.
Public right of way, if unadopted the landowner must keep it cleared (cannot obstruct or damage, has to remove a tree if it falls across the route) but is not obliged to maintain it.
Adopted public right of way, the highways authority (local council) is obliged to maintain.
Pavements (sidewalks) are always adopted if the roadway is adopted.
What about hunting?
Hunting is illegal in the UK.
But there may be a certain amount of confusion; hunting here means "on horseback following dogs".
Stalking (hunting land animals with a gun) is legal with the landowner's permission, provided the animal is not protected, but only with the owner's permission; you can't just go along a public right of way or use right to roam.
Shooting (birds) is the same as stalking.
Public lands it is impossible to get landowner's permission; stalking and shooting are only legal on private estates, generally only ones specifically set up for the purpose.
Farmers will shoot pest animals on their own land, but they generally don't allow people to do so for pleasure.
In some protected public lands, the park rangers may shoot and kill animals or birds to control populations, but they never issue hunting licences for this purpose.
Really nice for cyclists and other micromobilists too when entering or existing a place to park. (Yes, of course always yield to pedestrians first!)
Here in the UK, you get them a lot for people's drives - my parents, for instance, have a drive that ends at the pavement (sidewalk), and there's a curb cut on the other side of the pavement where it joins the roadway, so they don't have to climb the curb to park.
There's a good 99% Invisible about the curb cut effect - mostly about how that all came into being, but also about how many other things this is true of, when there are lots of other people that benefit.
The COVID portion of this.
The point is to get and keep policy at an equilibrium. CDC needed to have a messaging system that depended on constantly changing circumstances. It was disastrous that so much policy energy went into is/ix no COVID a big deal. It is but what to do in any one school/restaurant/workplace /transportation mode depended on the costs and benefits of doing something and those benefits varied with the status of the disease -- its prevalence, number of vaccinated people, etc. CDC was terrible at giving individuals and policy makers the information they needed to find that net benefit point. And the media was terrible about not calling it out for this failing.
The nadir of this failing, for me, was when all our employee lockers got taken away at work..."because covid". Somebody, somewhere, wasn't sufficiently sanitizing their surfaces to appease the lowest common denominator purity anxiety. And that means no one gets to have toys (except our managers, who curiously got to keep *their* personal drawers...hmm!) Nameplates were stripped, locks were bolt cuttered, personal effects were thrown out, years of memorabilia, community art, shrines to the dearly departed (including homages to literally-murdered coworkers) removed. And in the end, everyone ended up using their exact same "day use only lockers" as before, anyway. Completely pointless theatre on top of the hygiene theatre. It's theatre all the way down.
This even though as early as summer 2020 we knew fomite transmission Was Not A Thing, simply a wrongheaded tiny-stakes threat vector compared to aerosol transmission. Ironically, of course, the bleach-your-groceries hawks were the same ones loudly proclaiming They Knew All Along it was aerosols, not droplets...but how could you have meaningful surface transmission if it wasn't primarily droplet-based? Endless bad takes of the same bad study presented badly by the media..."In Contrived Laboratory Scenarios, Covid Can Be Detected On Surfaces Hours After Artificially High Concentrations Are Applied" would have been the accurate headline.
There were any number of other CDC blunders which got used to justify far more extreme overreactions...but this one was the straw that broke my backing of Trust The Science. An outcome that only a tiny shrill minority clamored for, which hurt everyone, significantly eroded the social fabric (we had finks reporting on coworkers who defiantly left stuff overnight in their lockers...what the hell?), with no empirical backing beyond The CDC Now Says. The modern social contract we don't need, but deserve: a NyQuil chicken in every InstaPot. (Yes, I know, that's the FDA rather than the CDC. At least the former performed impeccably regarding covid. And infant formula. And monkeypox.)