I did visit Siena, and I thought it's a scandal that we can't have built environments like that here! It's so easy, so efficient and so convenient to walk anywhere in that town. There's no green space in the core town, but there doesn't need to be - there's plenty of countryside downhill and the built environment is its own kind of lovely. How I wish I could buy a home in an American Siena!
"It’s maybe a consequence of the country’s architectural legacy lasting for thousands of years that while you do see massive investment in preserving old things, you don’t have hangups about the fact that the buildings across the street from the Colosseum don’t match the “neighborhood context” of the Flavian era."
Or is it a consequence of the adjacent architecture simply not lasting for thousands of years? I think it's the case that the matching buildings were either bombed to smithereens or voluntarily torn down before historic preservation was a priority. In other words, if matching buildings were still intact, you can bet there'd be hangups around building new, out of character structures. I think the lack of hangups Matt perceives here amounts to an accident of history.
Thank you! This is very interesting and helpful to me. My wife is half Italian and a dual citizen. We visit there often. Economic stagnation is clearly a problem there and has been obvious to us since 2011, when we first started going annually. We now have several good friends that we see there whenever we visit, and we've gotten to know their work and familial situations to the point where we know what they and their kids are doing (or not doing) for work, what they're most frustrated about in terms of the economy and the political situation, etc. Based on my experience and my relationships there, I think most Italians love Americans and America in general. But I wanted to note one development that you didn't touch on but that I think is important. When we first started going annually, our friends there made it clear that they would love for their young children to one day visit America and immerse themselves in American culture, make lifelong friends here and maybe even emigrate, as so many Italians did very successfully in the late 19th and 20th centuries. However, as time went on, and as these same Italian friends learned about one mass shooting after another in America, that desire for their kids to even visit (let alone emigrate) dramatically waned. Now, Italians want their kids to travel to Ireland, the UK and Australia. They still want them to learn English and pursue opportunities elsewhere, but they don't want them to go to America. America is too dangerous, too lawless, too violent. (Jan 6th certainly didn't help dispel these ideas.) I know that my experience and my friend set is limited, but I think what I'm reporting is pretty representative of Italian attitudes toward America now. It's sobering and heartbreaking for this proud American to hear all that, but I certainly understand it. For Italians, family is everything. The idea of sending your kid off to get shot in a mall or school or church in America is just something Italian parents can't do. We all know that you're more likely to die in a car crash anywhere in the world than get shot by a mass shooter in America. But, still, you're probably not ever going to get shot by a mass shooter in Ireland or the UK or Australia. Why take that chance?
Great piece. I was just in Italy as well, and my takeaways were similar, but with one caveat that you didn't mention: the all-cash grey-market economy is a real thing that hurts Italy's "official" growth by quite a lot. Many, many places I visited in Piemonte were under-the-table businesses that almost definitely didn't report earnings, and one reason that kept coming up when I asked folks about it was that enforcement is just insanely corrupt and arbitrary. If you do things right and _do_ report your earnings, you're at risk of whatever the Italian equivalent of Uncle Sam knocking on your door and demanding receipts and documentation that you probably don't have, and when don't produce it, you're in a world of trouble. So a lot of people just deal in cash and don't bother with anything on paper. Not a great recipe for economic growth.
Lots of things to say here (married to an Italian and coming to Italy for most holidays over the last two decades or so)
1) a generation without growth is terrible and moving away is on every twenty sole thing year old’s mind, it seems
2) Bologna is sole 50 km south of the river Po. It also cuts Toruń in two - my son lives on the south bank. If you want to separate northern Italy from the centre, the Rubicon is better (in antiquity, that was between Italia and Gallia cis-Alpina). But central Italy is great in terms of agro food, engineering and much more (EmiliaRomagna with Bologna as it’s capital, Tuscany, Marche, Umbria).
3) Italy is mountainous? Not only Alps but the heart of the peninsula all the way down south has 2009m+ summits. It’s hard to find a place on the map that’s not a two hour drive from a ski lift. I’ve skied in Basilicata and there’s skiing in both Calabria and Sicily.
4) MY has lots of positive things to say about metro systems but Italy’s non high speed trains are sad, municipal and regional busses are often poor (the Roman bus system a catastrophe by itself)
5) food quality and variety are beyond words. You basically can’t get away selling low quality exc around some tourist traps.
Maybe this helps explaining longevity? You can eat like a prince hardly aware of having been a near vegetarian all the time.
"... Italy has roughly five times America’s population density. ... tripling American population density would leave us with the density of France ...."
Unlike Italy and France, half of America is too arid to support much density. Most of those new Americans would have to live in the eastern half, which would then have a much higher density than France.
> The U.S. public sector should be aggressively hiring Italian managers to help improve our transit agencies …
I've seen this meme repeated a few places and it seems to ignore that
1. It has been tried.
2. It has not worked.
From the California HSR / Dragados debacle to Andy Byford's abortive reign at NYCTA, it turns out you can't just drop foreign expertise into a dysfunctional environment and expect improvements.
I was going to criticize your point by saying that Byford was only one person and not the whole agency brought in to do training and capacity building - but ultimately I agree with you that the dysfunction needs to be addressed first.
Instead, allow me to acknowledge the “Andrea Byfordoni” joke that is sitting out there - Andy Byford is not Italian.
I thought the idea of agency-level partnering was interesting, as opposed to just hiring in a new CEO. Forming lots of peer/mentorship relationships sounds a lot more valuable than mandates from high up.
I think the North/South divide is a bigger deal than the economic data suggest. I mean, Italy hasn't even really been a country for all that long (in absolute and relative terms) and I think that may be more deeply ingrained in the culture than Americans appreciate. Like, we have regional accents in the US, but the Southern dialect my family speaks is borderline unintelligible in Rome—at least no one there seemed to understand my relatives (I don't speak any kind of Italian). And traveling North-South in Italy feels more like going between countries than going from one end of France to the other. (Or East-West in Sicily, where even the architecture changes dramatically.)
Throw all those disparate people in a parliament together and you end up with a weird grab-bag of parties, petty regional issues snowballing (what what is, a trash incinerator that catalysed Draghi's resignation?) and regular ousting of the leadership. I quite often hear that Italian politics is like looking into America's future. It's not hard to see how a country in which geographical regions are indifferent toward or even disdainful of each other can become sufficiently dysfunctional that it stops growing.
Spain and France would have this issue too, since Catalan and Occitan/Provencal are all closer to each other than to Spanish/Portuguese or to standard French. But in the 19th century, France managed to mostly eliminate Occitan/Provencal.
I'm increasingly coming around to the idea that one of the US' major issues is adversarial legalism where it isn't appropriate. It's definitely appropriate in lots of cases like business contract enforcement, as Matt notes! But just as even economists are willing to admit 'market failures' that should be carved out from laissez-faire rules, I think we should admit 'adversarial legalism failures' where the system doesn't work:
• We should join all the other developed countries in having 'loser pays legal fees' being normal, to discourage vexatious litigation where it's cheaper to settle than to fight. (I always think it's funny how people recommend doing that for patent & defamation lawsuits- two high-profile areas of legal abuse- but don't note that every other 1st world countries does this for *every* lawsuit)
• Prevent an individual federal judge from issuing nationwide injunctions. They can issue an injunction in their little county or whatever, sure. An appeals court can do a nationwide injunction. But not a random judge stopping the entire country from doing x based on a Fox News-level legal analysis. There are almost 1800 judges nationally, right now any one can literally commandeer the entire federal government on any topic if they want!
• Strip any party that regularly abuses vexatious litigation of its ability to do so (NIMBY homeowners being the most prominent example here). Zoning decisions should be left up a zoning board and not the court system
"Loser pays" has its advantages in some instances but I assure you that it is by no means clear that it creates a net advantage in terms of societal structure. SLAPP lawsuits are already such a problem that we have specific legislation against them. Now imagine that you're being fighting a suit against a large and well-resourced entity in which your risk isn't just losing the suit, but paying for their team of high-powered lawyers. You've just handed the country to big business on a platter.
Rather than "loser pays", it should be "the party who is the plaintiff must pay all the legal fees of the defendant if the plaintiff loses". So, asymmetrical loser pays favoring defense.
Certainly one of the great mysteries of life is, if the American justice system is rigged in favor of the rich (as I am so often told on-line), why is it that there are a whole bunch of fee-shifting statutes (federal and state) that *only* operate in favor of plaintiffs? (Most immediately the Clayton Act for federal antitrust claims comes to mind, as do many consumer protection laws.) I'm aware of no "one way" fee-shifting statutes that favor defendants, even though when, one thinks about it, it's by definition the defendant who has the cost of litigation imposed on it, whereas filing suit for the plaintiff is optional in most situations.
Aren't anti-SLAPP laws just making defamation lawsuits 'loser pays'? That was my (non-attorney) understanding of them, I could be totally wrong. 1st Amendment types are always advocating for more anti-SLAPP legislation
The exact implementation of anti-SLAPP varies and isn’t my area of expertise, a quick review suggests that there’s often some form of punitive sanction against the filer. But it’s important to recognize that defamation is also a uniquely disfavored tort in American jurisprudence and thus unusually susceptible to early dismissal—it may have been a bad example to bring up due to to its wrinkles but the basic point was “well-resourced large entity who is in the wrong nevertheless forces smaller claimant with meritorious claim to forgo vindication due to resource asymmetry” is very much a real and existent pathology of American law even without loser pays. In many / most instances the large entity will be the defendant (eg Largeco stiffs a contractor or supplier) and “loser pays” makes it that much less attractive to represent even meritorious plaintiffs, whereas largeco can just eat the occasional loss of they fail to win through a combination of delay, intimidation and general resource advantages (eg near-spurious motion filings).
The current system definitely can create some unfairness to defendants but loser pays creates a kind of systematic bias against plaintiffs by making bringing suit so risky, and big business is a lot more often on the defendant side (for good or ill) than the plaintiff side.
According to Wikipedia 'nearly every Western democracy other than the United States' has loser pays rules. Are large and well-resourced entities running around not paying their bills, stiffing their suppliers etc., in all of the other developed countries? I find this a bit difficult to believe
Yes, please prevent district judges from issuing nationwide injunctions. We are now getting to the point where the Biden and Trump administrations are letting district judges issue injunctions against regulations they don't like and don't want to take the time to repeal, and then they just don't appeal the ruling, even though that is the administration's job. Congress should do this, and if they don't, the Supreme Court should. Justice Thomas has been wanting to ban district court nationwide injunctions for years.
As a commercial litigator, I want federal judges to have nationwide injunction power because if my client is suing someone for trade secret misappropriation or something like that it would be ridiculous to require us to have to file separate lawsuits in every federal judicial district (94!) in the country to be able to fully prevent the defendant from using the trade secret.
Nationwide injunctions are problematic, but there are situations where they are sort of a natural and logical result of the type of case you have. Like every successful administrative rule challenge in the D.C. federal courts has an outcome that's essentially the same thing as a "nationwide injunction" (since those rules have nationwide impacts), but that's just normal. It just so happens that when the rules at issue are, say, border patrol policies, the venue for the case often ends up being in a federal court in Arizona or wherever instead of in D.C.
Italy’s ability to build transit at a decent cost is even more impressive if you take into account the fact that the country is an earthquake zone so it has to be engineered to survive decent sized earthquakes. Yet another reason the transit agencies here on the east coast should hire out their experts.
"We Americans are so proud of our efficient and highly developed legal system that we want the solution to everything to be more rounds of legal review..."
Are we though?
I mean, aside from the lawyers who benefit from it.
I found this line interesting: "teach us to be less reliant on consultants and design-build contractors and more capable of doing in-house design and project management work." My whole career in a local gov't transit agency is subsumed in a default of, we make the pricey GCs compete for the work to get the best price, and the pressure to deliver the project makes in-house too risky, so we default to GCs because of their capacity & experience. However, we often wind up with the same outcome, beholden to an expensive GC who is not very responsive to client needs and an angered community. I would love for our agency to do more design and construction work in-house, but I fear that the political giving from GCs to the elected officials will stymie these efforts. In my corner of the US, regional transportation ballot measures are backed by money from the contractors association and their allies. That's a strong force to maintain the status quo. I think one thing MY misses in the in-house strategy is that the benefits/pension costs for in-housing someone make the GC route more desirable because their all-in labor cost is lower. However, I imagine the strategy here is to in-house the design and GC the construction to control labor costs.
Not sure about that last sentence. Yeah, legal review sucks, but SF (where I live) has highly democratic decision making on development and it’s mostly a disaster.
Should cities start using in-house talent to save money on street redesign?
A major street redesign is happening in our neighborhood. Being on the community council, I was invited to a “Brainstorm Workshop” yesterday which had 6-8 consultants (including 1-2 from a boutique place-making consultancy).
They had fancy table mock-ups, where we could mix and match Lego-like pieces to play with different street designs. All very slick, but it felt like a waste of money unless it was purely to make locals feel engaged. This project is $12-13m and the city transpo dept has 10-12 Transportation Planners and Transportation Engineers. Should they bring design in house instead of hiring consultants for every project?
I think Italy's inability to keep stable governments in power for very long is an underrated explanation of Italy's problems. Since the end of WWII, only three Italian prime minsters have been in power for more than 4 years at a time: Gasperi and Albo in the 1940s and 1950s, and only Berlusconi recently. Certainly the lack of temporal cohesion and stability of governments must effect the governance of the country? Like, could it be that part of the reason business deals in Italy are based a lot more on personal relationships is because it is unknown if the government in a few years will enforce contracts?
In sheer economic terms Italy really did fantastically well in the three odd decades after WW2, a period certainly characterized by political instability. I recall a lot of crowing about strong Italian performance in the 1980s, too (after a difficult 70s).
Perhaps it's because parliamentary systems normally have large permanent bureaucracies rather than a US-style spoils system, so in some cases that imparts a degree of resiliency? For similar reasons, Belgium seemed to chug along satisfactorily during its recent, long period of instability.
I think there's more commonality to the US spoils system and the parliamentary bureaucracy than difference. The British custom of putting people with no particular experience or competency in charge of arbitrary ministries (other than Exchequer, which AIUI people recognize actually needs someone with financial competence at the helm) and then mixing them up on a whim is rather notorious, but the U.S. system of distinguishing between political and non-political agency appointees (where the non-political ones create continuity in on-the-ground procedures and operations) seems like it's just a different flavor of that.
EDIT: Also I think "spoils system" is most commonly used to refer to the pre-professionalization days of the U.S. civil service in which some guy would literally write to (president) Ulysses S. Grant asking for an appointment as a postmaster, and so the political appointment cadre was closer to "everyone under the auspices of the Executive Branch."
>>>but the U.S. system of distinguishing between political and non-political agency appointees (where the non-political ones create continuity in on-the-ground procedures and operations) seems like it's just a different flavor of that.<<<
I don't know. There are thousands of political appointees in the US system. At least 4,000, I think. In the UK I don't believe there are more than 150 or so. And I doubt population differentials are really relevant, because this would mostly show up in the total size of the respective public sector workforces (not senior leadership/management as such). 4,000 vs. 150 seems a lot different from a mere contrast of "flavors" although admittedly, wrt to Italy, I was simply extrapolating from the UK practice. For all I know thousands of senior government officials in that country are politically appointed, and not career civil servants.
For the record I'm not romanticising the practice of minimizing political appointments in favor of maintaining a large, permanent, public sector managerial staff of career civil servants. The latter can most definitely be problematic. I was simply speculating such a system might serve as a counterweight to political instability. I mean, Italy really *did* do pretty well from 1945-1990 (the violence of the 1970s being the principal exception).
EDIT: Andrew Jackson is the president usually associated with full-throated political patronage, ie a "Spoils System." AFAIK that pattern continued unimpeded for decades at the federal level until the arrival of civil service reform. My impression, though, is the term is still used sometimes to refer to the US practice of large-scale political appointments vis-a-vis the the pattern of other high income democracies. But I haven't made a study of it.
Multiparty proportional representation with a low electoral threshold is just a poor way to run a country. (OK technically only two-thirds of the lower house's seats are elected by PR). Yes Germany and Japan make it work, but as a general statement, there are no other large or diverse countries that have ever made PR with tons of parties function. It's endless squabbling and coalitional collapses every year. It works when your country has a population of less than 5 million and a high degree of social consensus. Majoritarianism is underrated.
Plus, they don't have the German 'constructive vote of no confidence' rule- it says that Germany can only get rid of a PM when they have a substitute for him/her. Without this rule, it's much easier to collapse a government than to pick a new one. Plus, both houses can collapse the government, which is unique to Italy as far as I know
I am not entirely sure. Since WWII, most PMs have served 1-2 years max, and many haven't even made it 1 year. I think part of the explanation is the major economic and cultural differences between the northern and southern parts of the country, but beyond that I don't know.
I did visit Siena, and I thought it's a scandal that we can't have built environments like that here! It's so easy, so efficient and so convenient to walk anywhere in that town. There's no green space in the core town, but there doesn't need to be - there's plenty of countryside downhill and the built environment is its own kind of lovely. How I wish I could buy a home in an American Siena!
"It’s maybe a consequence of the country’s architectural legacy lasting for thousands of years that while you do see massive investment in preserving old things, you don’t have hangups about the fact that the buildings across the street from the Colosseum don’t match the “neighborhood context” of the Flavian era."
Or is it a consequence of the adjacent architecture simply not lasting for thousands of years? I think it's the case that the matching buildings were either bombed to smithereens or voluntarily torn down before historic preservation was a priority. In other words, if matching buildings were still intact, you can bet there'd be hangups around building new, out of character structures. I think the lack of hangups Matt perceives here amounts to an accident of history.
Thank you! This is very interesting and helpful to me. My wife is half Italian and a dual citizen. We visit there often. Economic stagnation is clearly a problem there and has been obvious to us since 2011, when we first started going annually. We now have several good friends that we see there whenever we visit, and we've gotten to know their work and familial situations to the point where we know what they and their kids are doing (or not doing) for work, what they're most frustrated about in terms of the economy and the political situation, etc. Based on my experience and my relationships there, I think most Italians love Americans and America in general. But I wanted to note one development that you didn't touch on but that I think is important. When we first started going annually, our friends there made it clear that they would love for their young children to one day visit America and immerse themselves in American culture, make lifelong friends here and maybe even emigrate, as so many Italians did very successfully in the late 19th and 20th centuries. However, as time went on, and as these same Italian friends learned about one mass shooting after another in America, that desire for their kids to even visit (let alone emigrate) dramatically waned. Now, Italians want their kids to travel to Ireland, the UK and Australia. They still want them to learn English and pursue opportunities elsewhere, but they don't want them to go to America. America is too dangerous, too lawless, too violent. (Jan 6th certainly didn't help dispel these ideas.) I know that my experience and my friend set is limited, but I think what I'm reporting is pretty representative of Italian attitudes toward America now. It's sobering and heartbreaking for this proud American to hear all that, but I certainly understand it. For Italians, family is everything. The idea of sending your kid off to get shot in a mall or school or church in America is just something Italian parents can't do. We all know that you're more likely to die in a car crash anywhere in the world than get shot by a mass shooter in America. But, still, you're probably not ever going to get shot by a mass shooter in Ireland or the UK or Australia. Why take that chance?
Great piece. I was just in Italy as well, and my takeaways were similar, but with one caveat that you didn't mention: the all-cash grey-market economy is a real thing that hurts Italy's "official" growth by quite a lot. Many, many places I visited in Piemonte were under-the-table businesses that almost definitely didn't report earnings, and one reason that kept coming up when I asked folks about it was that enforcement is just insanely corrupt and arbitrary. If you do things right and _do_ report your earnings, you're at risk of whatever the Italian equivalent of Uncle Sam knocking on your door and demanding receipts and documentation that you probably don't have, and when don't produce it, you're in a world of trouble. So a lot of people just deal in cash and don't bother with anything on paper. Not a great recipe for economic growth.
Lots of things to say here (married to an Italian and coming to Italy for most holidays over the last two decades or so)
1) a generation without growth is terrible and moving away is on every twenty sole thing year old’s mind, it seems
2) Bologna is sole 50 km south of the river Po. It also cuts Toruń in two - my son lives on the south bank. If you want to separate northern Italy from the centre, the Rubicon is better (in antiquity, that was between Italia and Gallia cis-Alpina). But central Italy is great in terms of agro food, engineering and much more (EmiliaRomagna with Bologna as it’s capital, Tuscany, Marche, Umbria).
3) Italy is mountainous? Not only Alps but the heart of the peninsula all the way down south has 2009m+ summits. It’s hard to find a place on the map that’s not a two hour drive from a ski lift. I’ve skied in Basilicata and there’s skiing in both Calabria and Sicily.
4) MY has lots of positive things to say about metro systems but Italy’s non high speed trains are sad, municipal and regional busses are often poor (the Roman bus system a catastrophe by itself)
5) food quality and variety are beyond words. You basically can’t get away selling low quality exc around some tourist traps.
Maybe this helps explaining longevity? You can eat like a prince hardly aware of having been a near vegetarian all the time.
Missed opportunity: "Because I’m a (slow) boring person..."
"... Italy has roughly five times America’s population density. ... tripling American population density would leave us with the density of France ...."
Unlike Italy and France, half of America is too arid to support much density. Most of those new Americans would have to live in the eastern half, which would then have a much higher density than France.
France has an empty chunk too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_diagonal
> The U.S. public sector should be aggressively hiring Italian managers to help improve our transit agencies …
I've seen this meme repeated a few places and it seems to ignore that
1. It has been tried.
2. It has not worked.
From the California HSR / Dragados debacle to Andy Byford's abortive reign at NYCTA, it turns out you can't just drop foreign expertise into a dysfunctional environment and expect improvements.
I was going to criticize your point by saying that Byford was only one person and not the whole agency brought in to do training and capacity building - but ultimately I agree with you that the dysfunction needs to be addressed first.
Instead, allow me to acknowledge the “Andrea Byfordoni” joke that is sitting out there - Andy Byford is not Italian.
I thought the idea of agency-level partnering was interesting, as opposed to just hiring in a new CEO. Forming lots of peer/mentorship relationships sounds a lot more valuable than mandates from high up.
I think the North/South divide is a bigger deal than the economic data suggest. I mean, Italy hasn't even really been a country for all that long (in absolute and relative terms) and I think that may be more deeply ingrained in the culture than Americans appreciate. Like, we have regional accents in the US, but the Southern dialect my family speaks is borderline unintelligible in Rome—at least no one there seemed to understand my relatives (I don't speak any kind of Italian). And traveling North-South in Italy feels more like going between countries than going from one end of France to the other. (Or East-West in Sicily, where even the architecture changes dramatically.)
Throw all those disparate people in a parliament together and you end up with a weird grab-bag of parties, petty regional issues snowballing (what what is, a trash incinerator that catalysed Draghi's resignation?) and regular ousting of the leadership. I quite often hear that Italian politics is like looking into America's future. It's not hard to see how a country in which geographical regions are indifferent toward or even disdainful of each other can become sufficiently dysfunctional that it stops growing.
On this point - one of the major divisions linguists recognize in the Romance language family actually splits the northern Italian dialects from the southern ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Spezia%E2%80%93Rimini_Line
Spain and France would have this issue too, since Catalan and Occitan/Provencal are all closer to each other than to Spanish/Portuguese or to standard French. But in the 19th century, France managed to mostly eliminate Occitan/Provencal.
I'm increasingly coming around to the idea that one of the US' major issues is adversarial legalism where it isn't appropriate. It's definitely appropriate in lots of cases like business contract enforcement, as Matt notes! But just as even economists are willing to admit 'market failures' that should be carved out from laissez-faire rules, I think we should admit 'adversarial legalism failures' where the system doesn't work:
• We should join all the other developed countries in having 'loser pays legal fees' being normal, to discourage vexatious litigation where it's cheaper to settle than to fight. (I always think it's funny how people recommend doing that for patent & defamation lawsuits- two high-profile areas of legal abuse- but don't note that every other 1st world countries does this for *every* lawsuit)
• Prevent an individual federal judge from issuing nationwide injunctions. They can issue an injunction in their little county or whatever, sure. An appeals court can do a nationwide injunction. But not a random judge stopping the entire country from doing x based on a Fox News-level legal analysis. There are almost 1800 judges nationally, right now any one can literally commandeer the entire federal government on any topic if they want!
• Strip any party that regularly abuses vexatious litigation of its ability to do so (NIMBY homeowners being the most prominent example here). Zoning decisions should be left up a zoning board and not the court system
"Loser pays" has its advantages in some instances but I assure you that it is by no means clear that it creates a net advantage in terms of societal structure. SLAPP lawsuits are already such a problem that we have specific legislation against them. Now imagine that you're being fighting a suit against a large and well-resourced entity in which your risk isn't just losing the suit, but paying for their team of high-powered lawyers. You've just handed the country to big business on a platter.
Rather than "loser pays", it should be "the party who is the plaintiff must pay all the legal fees of the defendant if the plaintiff loses". So, asymmetrical loser pays favoring defense.
Arbitration agreements already make it hard enough to sue a corporation. Why would you want to make it harder?
Because I think that downside is worth the upsides in other areas.
Certainly one of the great mysteries of life is, if the American justice system is rigged in favor of the rich (as I am so often told on-line), why is it that there are a whole bunch of fee-shifting statutes (federal and state) that *only* operate in favor of plaintiffs? (Most immediately the Clayton Act for federal antitrust claims comes to mind, as do many consumer protection laws.) I'm aware of no "one way" fee-shifting statutes that favor defendants, even though when, one thinks about it, it's by definition the defendant who has the cost of litigation imposed on it, whereas filing suit for the plaintiff is optional in most situations.
This seems like a great way to prevent both meritorious and nuisance plaintiff's suits, though.
Aren't anti-SLAPP laws just making defamation lawsuits 'loser pays'? That was my (non-attorney) understanding of them, I could be totally wrong. 1st Amendment types are always advocating for more anti-SLAPP legislation
The exact implementation of anti-SLAPP varies and isn’t my area of expertise, a quick review suggests that there’s often some form of punitive sanction against the filer. But it’s important to recognize that defamation is also a uniquely disfavored tort in American jurisprudence and thus unusually susceptible to early dismissal—it may have been a bad example to bring up due to to its wrinkles but the basic point was “well-resourced large entity who is in the wrong nevertheless forces smaller claimant with meritorious claim to forgo vindication due to resource asymmetry” is very much a real and existent pathology of American law even without loser pays. In many / most instances the large entity will be the defendant (eg Largeco stiffs a contractor or supplier) and “loser pays” makes it that much less attractive to represent even meritorious plaintiffs, whereas largeco can just eat the occasional loss of they fail to win through a combination of delay, intimidation and general resource advantages (eg near-spurious motion filings).
The current system definitely can create some unfairness to defendants but loser pays creates a kind of systematic bias against plaintiffs by making bringing suit so risky, and big business is a lot more often on the defendant side (for good or ill) than the plaintiff side.
According to Wikipedia 'nearly every Western democracy other than the United States' has loser pays rules. Are large and well-resourced entities running around not paying their bills, stiffing their suppliers etc., in all of the other developed countries? I find this a bit difficult to believe
Yes, please prevent district judges from issuing nationwide injunctions. We are now getting to the point where the Biden and Trump administrations are letting district judges issue injunctions against regulations they don't like and don't want to take the time to repeal, and then they just don't appeal the ruling, even though that is the administration's job. Congress should do this, and if they don't, the Supreme Court should. Justice Thomas has been wanting to ban district court nationwide injunctions for years.
As a commercial litigator, I want federal judges to have nationwide injunction power because if my client is suing someone for trade secret misappropriation or something like that it would be ridiculous to require us to have to file separate lawsuits in every federal judicial district (94!) in the country to be able to fully prevent the defendant from using the trade secret.
Nationwide injunctions are problematic, but there are situations where they are sort of a natural and logical result of the type of case you have. Like every successful administrative rule challenge in the D.C. federal courts has an outcome that's essentially the same thing as a "nationwide injunction" (since those rules have nationwide impacts), but that's just normal. It just so happens that when the rules at issue are, say, border patrol policies, the venue for the case often ends up being in a federal court in Arizona or wherever instead of in D.C.
Italy’s ability to build transit at a decent cost is even more impressive if you take into account the fact that the country is an earthquake zone so it has to be engineered to survive decent sized earthquakes. Yet another reason the transit agencies here on the east coast should hire out their experts.
"We Americans are so proud of our efficient and highly developed legal system that we want the solution to everything to be more rounds of legal review..."
Are we though?
I mean, aside from the lawyers who benefit from it.
The problem is those lawyers are major donors to the Democratic Party.
I found this line interesting: "teach us to be less reliant on consultants and design-build contractors and more capable of doing in-house design and project management work." My whole career in a local gov't transit agency is subsumed in a default of, we make the pricey GCs compete for the work to get the best price, and the pressure to deliver the project makes in-house too risky, so we default to GCs because of their capacity & experience. However, we often wind up with the same outcome, beholden to an expensive GC who is not very responsive to client needs and an angered community. I would love for our agency to do more design and construction work in-house, but I fear that the political giving from GCs to the elected officials will stymie these efforts. In my corner of the US, regional transportation ballot measures are backed by money from the contractors association and their allies. That's a strong force to maintain the status quo. I think one thing MY misses in the in-house strategy is that the benefits/pension costs for in-housing someone make the GC route more desirable because their all-in labor cost is lower. However, I imagine the strategy here is to in-house the design and GC the construction to control labor costs.
Not sure about that last sentence. Yeah, legal review sucks, but SF (where I live) has highly democratic decision making on development and it’s mostly a disaster.
Should cities start using in-house talent to save money on street redesign?
A major street redesign is happening in our neighborhood. Being on the community council, I was invited to a “Brainstorm Workshop” yesterday which had 6-8 consultants (including 1-2 from a boutique place-making consultancy).
They had fancy table mock-ups, where we could mix and match Lego-like pieces to play with different street designs. All very slick, but it felt like a waste of money unless it was purely to make locals feel engaged. This project is $12-13m and the city transpo dept has 10-12 Transportation Planners and Transportation Engineers. Should they bring design in house instead of hiring consultants for every project?
Yes anything cities envision doing repeatedly they should try to build capacity to manage in-house.
I think Italy's inability to keep stable governments in power for very long is an underrated explanation of Italy's problems. Since the end of WWII, only three Italian prime minsters have been in power for more than 4 years at a time: Gasperi and Albo in the 1940s and 1950s, and only Berlusconi recently. Certainly the lack of temporal cohesion and stability of governments must effect the governance of the country? Like, could it be that part of the reason business deals in Italy are based a lot more on personal relationships is because it is unknown if the government in a few years will enforce contracts?
In sheer economic terms Italy really did fantastically well in the three odd decades after WW2, a period certainly characterized by political instability. I recall a lot of crowing about strong Italian performance in the 1980s, too (after a difficult 70s).
Perhaps it's because parliamentary systems normally have large permanent bureaucracies rather than a US-style spoils system, so in some cases that imparts a degree of resiliency? For similar reasons, Belgium seemed to chug along satisfactorily during its recent, long period of instability.
I think there's more commonality to the US spoils system and the parliamentary bureaucracy than difference. The British custom of putting people with no particular experience or competency in charge of arbitrary ministries (other than Exchequer, which AIUI people recognize actually needs someone with financial competence at the helm) and then mixing them up on a whim is rather notorious, but the U.S. system of distinguishing between political and non-political agency appointees (where the non-political ones create continuity in on-the-ground procedures and operations) seems like it's just a different flavor of that.
EDIT: Also I think "spoils system" is most commonly used to refer to the pre-professionalization days of the U.S. civil service in which some guy would literally write to (president) Ulysses S. Grant asking for an appointment as a postmaster, and so the political appointment cadre was closer to "everyone under the auspices of the Executive Branch."
>>>but the U.S. system of distinguishing between political and non-political agency appointees (where the non-political ones create continuity in on-the-ground procedures and operations) seems like it's just a different flavor of that.<<<
I don't know. There are thousands of political appointees in the US system. At least 4,000, I think. In the UK I don't believe there are more than 150 or so. And I doubt population differentials are really relevant, because this would mostly show up in the total size of the respective public sector workforces (not senior leadership/management as such). 4,000 vs. 150 seems a lot different from a mere contrast of "flavors" although admittedly, wrt to Italy, I was simply extrapolating from the UK practice. For all I know thousands of senior government officials in that country are politically appointed, and not career civil servants.
I got a bit of detail here:
https://theconversation.com/dominic-cummings-wants-to-add-more-political-appointees-to-the-civil-service-heres-why-thats-a-problem-129097
For the record I'm not romanticising the practice of minimizing political appointments in favor of maintaining a large, permanent, public sector managerial staff of career civil servants. The latter can most definitely be problematic. I was simply speculating such a system might serve as a counterweight to political instability. I mean, Italy really *did* do pretty well from 1945-1990 (the violence of the 1970s being the principal exception).
EDIT: Andrew Jackson is the president usually associated with full-throated political patronage, ie a "Spoils System." AFAIK that pattern continued unimpeded for decades at the federal level until the arrival of civil service reform. My impression, though, is the term is still used sometimes to refer to the US practice of large-scale political appointments vis-a-vis the the pattern of other high income democracies. But I haven't made a study of it.
What's the explanation for Italy's inability to keep stable governments in power for very long?
Multiparty proportional representation with a low electoral threshold is just a poor way to run a country. (OK technically only two-thirds of the lower house's seats are elected by PR). Yes Germany and Japan make it work, but as a general statement, there are no other large or diverse countries that have ever made PR with tons of parties function. It's endless squabbling and coalitional collapses every year. It works when your country has a population of less than 5 million and a high degree of social consensus. Majoritarianism is underrated.
Plus, they don't have the German 'constructive vote of no confidence' rule- it says that Germany can only get rid of a PM when they have a substitute for him/her. Without this rule, it's much easier to collapse a government than to pick a new one. Plus, both houses can collapse the government, which is unique to Italy as far as I know
I am not entirely sure. Since WWII, most PMs have served 1-2 years max, and many haven't even made it 1 year. I think part of the explanation is the major economic and cultural differences between the northern and southern parts of the country, but beyond that I don't know.