“supply has no bearing on rental price because supply is unknown by the landlord as they set their rental price”
I’m sorry, I realize it’s not the point of this article to dunk on this guy but this was so breathtakingly stupid that I had to take a moment to breathe deeply and calm myself. People are literally standing in multi-block lines to view apartment openings in some cities. I’m pretty sure that landlords pay close attention to that sort of thing.
The guy setting prices at the corner gas station doesn't know the supply of oil either. He knows that the gas stations in his area are setting the price between $3.85 and $4.15 and wants to be on the lower side of that range.
The guy renting the apartment doesn't need to know what the supply/demand is - he needs to know what similar apartments are going for and decide where he wants to land in the spread of prices.
I mean this is the basic intuition for “new buildings raise rents” - adding a big number to the comparables supposedly enhances the value of everything nearby.
I don’t think it’s true, and AFAIK the research rejects it. It’s a left NIMBY talking point. But the “real estate prices are determined by comparables” thing is how they claim it works. New expensive building, higher comps in the neighborhood, higher prices overall.
Comps take into account the quality, age, amenities, etc. An old apartment wouldn't comp at the same rate as a new apartment even if they have the exact same footprint.
Also like, say I don't look at any comparisons whatsoever when I post my condo for rent. But I don't get any applications, so I lower the price until I do get some.
I just incorporated information about supply and demand into the rental price, did I not?
Yeah, this is absolutely 101-level “how do markets work, even if you don’t like them” stuff. You don’t have to sign on to all of Hayek’s _pre_scriptions to acknowledge that his _de_scriptions were largely accurate!
Yeah I went looking for the author cuz I was like "wat" and apparently he's a PhD candidate or post-doc in urban planning, which I thought was weird because so much of what he wrote is unrelated to how being in the business of being a landlord actually works. I thought you'd have to know that stuff to be involved in urban planning.
As Zvi once pointed out, there are some possibilities:
1) new construction might make some landlords who have been vastly undercharging realize their mistake. It seems unlikely that a landlord who undercharges is doing so mistakenly, though -- more likely they have a reason like "This way I don't have to bother with changing tenants every couple of years"
2) some people are in fact idiots who think that this is how pricing works
You can't do much about 1) but there's handy thing called a "market" that generally causes people in 2) to go broke and leave the market, so it takes care of itself.
Why bother going to Starfleet Academy when there is holodeck abundance? Who would want to deal with actual humans when such a technology exists? I for one would spend my entire life having deeply meaningful and intellectually rich trists with absolutely stunning holograms that would play chess just poorly enough to let me win occasionally and turn the entire process into a compelling erotic game. Said holograms would also love all of my SB comments and would help me launch my own “substack” where fawning subscribers would cheer me on and offer up their nubile charms.
The holodecks seem supply limited to me. Just going off my memory of the show. I don’t know why they would be, probably a lot of resources are needed to contain all the rogue AIs they generate
Given the sparse apparent population of earth & the tiny size of Starfleet even late in the Dominion War when the Dominion is threatening core Federation planets like Betazed, I suspect the vast majority of the population have retreated to holodeck pursuits but they aren't shown in-show because that's too depressing.
It's either that or show-writers aren't good at understanding numbers & what full-scale war mobilization would look like for a society with replicators, and it's definitely not the second one :p
Raising kids is easier now than it has been for most of history and yet people are having fewer kids. Assuming that trend continues, the federation might need to add new planets and their populations just to maintain their current population.
The Federation gets to exist in a liminal space where mid-20th-century-liberalism never runs into serious reality problems, so the composition of the Federation is similar to 1950s America.
In our timeline, it currently looks like in the year 2300 most of humanity will be of African descent, and most of the rest are hyperreligious groups like Orthodox Jews & Amish.
Unlikely. Modern people have much higher real incomes than people in the early 1900s, and thus could easily afford a 1900s-like package of goods and services with plenty of income to spare to raise a large brood of children who (thanks to modern technological and medical advances) will be easier to raise and cause less heartbreak by dying.
People are choosing to have many fewer kids because of some complicated combination of:
(1) high-status people model low fertility / high fertility is coded as low status
(2) high-status people are high-education and therefore everyone is encouraged to spend their highest fertility years on education
(3) people might lose status by owning a smaller house & having more kids
(4) Netflix & international travel are both very fun, and so compete with "joy of child-rearing", especially for the anxious, risk-averse, low-energy, or borderline-depressed
Under the conditions of modernity, the groups that have a lot of children are the groups that choose to have a lot of children, so the religious. The future will be very weird to us if secular culture doesn't find a way to pull itself out of its low fertility spiral.
It appears to be canon that Starfleet officers at least prioritize their careers over having kids and don’t get married until middle age. Both Jake Sisko and William Crusher were only children after all.
Star Fleet family sizes appear very small -- when crew members mention siblings, the framing often implies that its their only sibling.
Later movies and shows have shown UFP cities, but nothing that would match having large populations AFAIK? Memory Alpha seems to think that Earth's population was never stated but populations of Federations worlds are in the millions or low billions if mentioned at all.
I wouldn't take the ~~experience machine~~ ~~metaverse~~ holodeck.
I absolutely adore Twitter and the funny, brilliant I interact with there, and similarly get value out of Discord, Reddit, HN, etc. -- but it could never replace IRL for me, only complement it.
The other possibility is to create new axes of status. Different genres of music and different sports produce their own status hierarchies, and to the people that care about one, the others are basically invisible. If you have enough status hierarchies, then it’s not obviously impossible that everyone could be near the top in one of the few they care about.
The pickleball status hierarchy is an interesting example, as it it a new sport. There is absolutely a county-level pickleball status hierarchy on south side Atlanta, though reputations of good players can spill over into adjacent counties, eg Fayette to Coweta, where they have better facilities. Recently, the “pro” tour visited peachtree city. One of my friends hosted a professional female player, presumably because only the very top pickleball pros can afford a hotel room. One of the top male players has a reputation for screwing every woman in sight. My joke is he gets all the tail because he can afford the hot tub “suite” at the Holiday Inn.
This has been an issue I've long debated and while I agree that there is definitely a great deal of room to make things better or worse by having many or few axes of status I'm quite doubtful that the truly utopian vision you suggest is possible.
I mean, in a certain useless sense everyone could be at the top by being in their own individual status hierarchy but short of us all reaching Buddha style enlightenment (or, wireheading which I think is the right way long term) that's not going to offer satisfaction.
Given current human psychology being at the top means having ppl spend time treating you with respect. Sure, you can be an emminent professor and enjoy your time on the pickle ball court but no one is going to feel much satisfaction (life level as opposed to a bit of fun) at being the pickle ball best amoung a bunch of ppl who don't really care about being the best at pickle ball.
At the end of the day our concern for status is closely connected with our reproductive drives and while we can fool them to an extent the kind of things that make us feel good about status look alot like the kind of things that work well for dating (ppl talking to you and treating you a certain way). It's just not possible for everyone to have that...someone is still the person in the group at the bar all their preferred partners or ppl they want respect from are the least interested in talking to.
I don't literally mean that it's all about the sex but it's about being treated as desireable in a way that limits on time and the desire to interact regularly with the same ppl makes fundamentally rivalrous. Maybe your community is star trek fan fic but you can't trick your psych into thinking that being the world's best Borg/data LOTR crossover writer is a big deal if it's not a major focus in your community.
The question is how far away from that cap are we.
it’s not quite that simple. women continue to pursue status after menopause, and not just on behalf of their grandchildren. men continue to pursue status even if they are impotent and not just on behalf of their offspring. i have no illusions that i will ever get laid on account of my SB comments, yet i enjoy this discourse even though 90% of the people in this space are male and it holds no erotic interest for me
Yes, apparently I wasn't clear enough when I said it's not literally all about the sex.
But the point being is that status is an incentive to get reproductively valuable resources *like* sexual interest but also position, food etc for our offspring/relatives etc... I didn't mean it's literally sex or your target sex has to be aware of this kind of status but merely to evoke the fact that what makes u feel good is ppl treating you in ways that are alot like the kind of things which attract sexual interest (which are just like the things that help your kids get food/position when older bc that future ability is an imp facet of what makes ppl attractive)
Since we are no longer in an evolutionary environment those signals can be tricked to a degree. But it for the same reason it's obvious everyone can't feel like they are on top of the sexual heap the fact that status tends to work similarly (ie it's an incentive to get us to do things that give us a greater frac of rivalrous goods) means you can't hijack it to the extent where everyone feels at the very top.
In other words evo ensures we care both about being on top of a status hierarchy and how much others care about that hierarchy so you can't make everyone super satisfied by making them all the most important person on some super narrow Wikipedia page since they'll know no one else is super impressed (they might be interested and respect your knowledge but they are also the top expert on their page they think is more interesting).
Worse, the more you give ppl the ability to shove off a status hierarchy they are on the bottom of the less cohesive social groups become and you lose serious long term connections. But if you have long term connections you'll compare yourself and can be found wanting.
Don't get me wrong we can improve things alot by changing these things. But we can't hope you get to a point where everyone feels on top of the world.
But I think it's a real interesting question what kind of arrangement maximizes utility here. Seems like there are a few relevant parameters: group/status hierarchy sizes, number of hierarchies a person participates in and ease of joining and dropping out.
At one end of you split everyone into 150 person tribes permanently it probably feels just as good to be chief in your tribe as it does to be a rockstar. Problem is that being at the bottom is utter shit.
Ok, so you open things up and try and spread ppl across many hierarchies and make it easier to move between them so ppl can all find what they are good at.
But this obviously isn't so good at the extreme either as you end up in the situation where everyone is the head honcho for their favorite Wikipedia page but no one else really finds it that impressive (after all they have their own and that interests them more). Worse you get no real sense of community because it's much too easy to leave.
I'd love to see some sociology done on this and it should be relatively easy since the obvious study group is academics (you can look at very specialized vs broad fields etc).
I don't think they are *that* correlated even now. Low income communities have their own status hierarchies, and within those communities relatively poor and less-educated people can still be high status in the eyes of the people whose opinions matter to them.
Of course there are some constants in status, mostly that people with high social-emotional intelligence tend to be higher status than those that don't, and of course there are material factors as well. But status hierarchies are usually pretty specific to your interests and location rather than broad structures including everyone.
The degree of attention people pay to local versus national/international status hierarchies is not fixed. One of the worst things about the internet (and tv before it) is they divert attention from local status hierarchies to national ones, where most people will inevitably be losers.
I disagree with this, it can easy to be cool within a small online group by being the most knowledgeable person on a niche forum or the funniest guy in a groupchat.
Holo-addiction would be pathological on a starship exploring new worlds where there is limited space for crew, meaning there are limited human hours to perform mission critical tasks and keep the ship running. Starfleet has obvious reasons for not allowing holodeck abundance on ships that perform difficult missions.
Holodeck immersion on earth would be much less problematic. What economic function do earthlings really perform in a post scarcity society? I have not watched every episode, but I suspect that is one of the many plot holes in Star Trek.
I think there's a strong case for starship holodeck abolition, given how many times the holodeck almost destroyed the Enterprise or endangered members of its crew.
Shorn of any economic or utilitarian purpose and immune from want, holo deprived earthlings might use their replicators to synthesize booze and fentanyl, then to replace their livers before they failed. Still, acute overdoses would sometimes occur, resulting in deaths of despair. Liberals would argue for bringing back holodecks while conservatives bickered between smashing replicators altogether and preemptive war against the Romulans.
Seems like that depends on whether you actually mean "trist" (To trust, have faith in) or you mean "tryst" (A prearranged meeting or assignation, now especially between lovers to meet at a specific place and time)?
... by invoking the existence and omnibenevolence of God. If you don't accept either of his proofs of God's existence (and they're both pretty shaky), then it's still a live question.
He used other proofs, such as the idea that if one could find a triangle whose internal angles did not sum to 180 degrees, that would be evidence for a powerful deceiver.
It's a short work. Dunno how many pages, but I remember it being a slender, cheap paperback when I had to read it for intro to philosophy.* (It's available for free on the tubes these days, of course, but I'm old enough that I went to school in the pre-internet days. Not literally the pre-internet days, but the days when the only people using the internet were a handful of CS undergrads and a TA or two in the SPARC lab.) It's worth reading in full, and, frankly, I'm not in the best circumstances at the moment to do it even partial justice.
Another comment here mentioned the hand-wavy way that Descartes demonstrated that God exists. True to an extent, but he was a man of his time, and I'm willing to cut him some slack on that point. In any case, by the final meditation he mostly gets away from that and gets going on what I suppose we'd call today 'mind-body duality.'
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*It was a while before I figured it out because it wasn't billed this way, but this intro phil course was actually an ethics for engineers course. Another of the readings was the novel Ringworld.
Worth noting that he gives the same sequence of arguments in two places: the standalone Meditations, originally written in Latin, and the introduction to Discourse On The Method, originally written in French. Both are available in translation, and the introduction to Discourse is available without the rest of the book (which I haven't read; I believe it's about his work in physics and other natural science, and hence only really interesting to historians of science). The only substantial difference between the two is the argument he uses for the existence of God.
It's been a long time since I read either the Meditations or the Discourse on the Method, but IIRC his argument was "God exists, because [logical sleight of hand]; God would not deceive us to such a great extent; therefore we are not living in a simulation". After the brilliance of the first two Meditations it's a bit of a let-down, frankly.
There is a category of leftist that thinks trade-offs are something that will be abolished when capitalism is abolished. End capitalism and the horn of plenty will be unleashed. You tend to see a lot of this nonsense when talking about global warming and agriculture.
It's a way of coping with scarcity being a fact of life. It is emotionally easier to deal with not getting something you want because there isn't enough of it if you believe that it is being kept from you by nefarious people.
I am sure that there are some people who believe they know how to produce and allocate goods and services more efficiently than market forces, and they indeed are just wrong, but also, most people do not think that way. Goods and services have become a lot less scarce in the last 200-300 years, but the envy, jealousy, and tribal suspicions humans developed in a much higher scarcity environment have not gone away, which impacts the desires people have and how they think about why those desires are sometimes not fulfilled.
I agree even though I don’t get most of the Star Trek references. I deal with NIMBYs in my professional life and am always looking for ways to frame these issues so as to make them compelling to normal people. Saving this post!
Funnily enough it seems like it would be even harder to get more housing built in MY's Trek world. At least in a market system, homeowners benefit from upzoning due to the land they sit on becoming more valuable. In socialist utopia, it is pure loss, no gain. Market incentives matter!
I applaud the point that zoning matters even in utopia. However you sure went to extremes to appeal to the Star Wars socialists in the room. I imagine you are sensitive to the increasing tension within the housing movement between the Left YIMBYs and the mkt YIMBYs. My concern is by turning apologist to the Left camp and bending over backwards to squeeze abundant housing into a Lefty alignment, we risk the effectiveness and potential of abundant housing at large. Take California's AB 2011 which you recently cheered, which allows increased density along commercial corridors. The fine print is the required use of union labor (as if zoning operates independent of construction costs) and the requirement to subsidize 15% of the constructed units at below market rents. Both of these measures blunt the upzoning upside such that it will not bring the change YIMBYs of all flavors would like to see. Politics is a compromise, and up to this point unions have been fighting housing for their self interested (state mandated) seat at the table. Zoning is important, and coalition building across the galaxy is great, but we can't lose sight of the non-zoning factors at play, nor of the power of econ 101 argument at large when applied to housing, neither of which we should shy away from or tip toe around if we want real change. Construction costs (and regulatory time to approval) matter too.
In CA and the Boston area zoning is overwhelmingly the binding constraint on development. By far the most effective way to project land value is zoned development rights, because developers almost always build right up to their allowances.
At the current margins construction costs are not primary drivers of prices.
Is this true? I remember a long anecdote a few years back in Conor Dougherty's book Golden Gates about CA *finally* passing a huge, unprecedented funding package for affordable housing (coupled either with zoning reforms in the relevant locations or else it was on land the gov't already owned,
can't remember) that turned out to be basically useless because construction costs (I think likewise using union labor) were so high that they could only build a teeny fraction of the housing there was demand for. Sorry that I can't remember any of the numbers off the top of my head!
Obviously this was specifically for affordable housing so they couldn't recoup costs in rents, but the numbers were truly staggering - my impression at the time was that even in CA a perfect left-YIMBY storm couldn't overcome construction costs.
Revealed preferences indicate that it is very much true in terms of the overwhelming driver of land prices is the number of square feet or number units allowed by zoning. In Boston and coastal CA developers nearly always build right up to the limit they are legally allowed and often spend time and money to get variances to build more.
California actually passed two versions of the commercial upzoning law, one requires union labor (needed to get the various powerful union construction lobbies on board) and the other that requires BMR targets that are similar to the builders remedy, which is currently going gangbusters in Southern California as more cities fall out of line:
It's funny, Kevin, don't know if you're aware but confusing Wars with Trek is like the worst possible mistake in that universe. It's worse than going to Talos IV without a permit.
Rant: This has basically nothing to do with your post but every time I see the Bay Area (and San Francisco) from a plane I am reminded how difficult it it would be to explain to someone from outside of the US that it has a housing crisis. They would point at all the empty land and vast expanses of single family homes and think you could just tear 20% of that down and replace it with some bigger buildings and problem solved. Anyone who e.g. had been in charge of the city of Istanbul (which has plenty of its own problems) would fix the problem in a year or two (if given the same policy levers).
Those policy levers (macro and micro) are of course the key challenge but I find that it's good to remind oneself and others about the sheer madness of it all. Undermining American growth and prosperity for decades and continuously ratcheting up inequality all so that they don't have to deal with a bit of change or see a tall building in the distance.
What's even crazier about it is that you wouldn't have to forcibly relocate people and have the government do all the work. If you just let people who wanted to make a crap ton of money with their property redevelop it, you could have that happen exclusively by people happily making decisions to make themselves richer using private capital!
Left NIMBYism makes a lot of sense if you don’t think people’s desires to relocate are important. Price controls or public housing avoid the cost burden and displacement problems for incumbents, which are what “the housing crisis” means to them.
There might be some concern for children born and raised somewhere to eventually get their own households, but organic population growth is a smaller and less disruptive demand pressure to meet than what is actually happening on desirable and/or “tech” regions over the last decade.
I really want to have a "dislike" button on substack. I would press it repeatedly for this post for the sole reason of linking to that poorly-written, poorly-argued, economically illiterate post by Kevin Rogan.
I read it [ed: the post by Rogan], then read it again, desperately searching for a thread of logic I could follow from sentence to sentence. Instead, I stumbled blindly (along with the author, it appears) to the predetermined conclusion that supply doesn't matter to housing prices. A tiring journey for so early in the morning.
I actually got a lot out of it! My reading guide would be:
Rogan misunderstands how incentives work in a fundamental way, thinking of them more like laws. This is a very common mistake, which I have seen even among some successful students in mid-level undergraduate Econ (which is as far as I have taken). BUT his post does offer some mechanisms/theory for why we might expect housing prices to respond slowly to changes in supply (basically, individual actors up and down the supply chain can’t predict the future). I don’t know to what extent even that conclusion will hold once you account for some of the things he forgets, but he at least added some nuance to my mental model.
The conclusion is obviously silly. There’s value in the piece.
There is no value in that essay: The author is ignorant.
He writes that an apartment property, “may change hands many time over its life as well, further occluding any information about initial selling price.” He fundamentally misunderstands how a commercial asset is valued. In brief, a commercial asset such as an apartment building has the potential to generate income, and the amount of income potential determines the price. The cost of the asset when built is irrelevant to that calculation.
This type of post is the downside of writing four posts a week. It could easily be written in a couple hours as it required basically no research. I would rather Matt write fewer posts and put as much useful data in his work as Milan does. The only alternative is hiring more interns and, if Matt is up to 13k subscribers, he can certainly drop several grand a month to do that.
I dunno I think this type of thing is very useful. Leftists in US seem to swing wildly between advocating central planning by government economic specialists and loud comments about how much they hate ‘economists’.
Matt, something I don’t hear you dig into much is the history of how we got here. Up until the Great Depression, US cities boomed and tearing down or moving small buildings to put up bigger ones was seen as a sign of progress and generally lauded. It happened everywhere all the time.
FDR went to great lengths to remake the housing and development market, specifically with a Marxist view that the goal was to equitably distribute people across the landscape. The Great Depression was so bad it killed off nearly all developers and construction practice from pre-1930, the planners spent the 1930s writing all these new rules with minimal testing (as so little was built). Finally, after the war we basically re-started with an entirely new operating system for how we make places.
The problem today is in large part: post-war development doesn’t scale well! “Modern” city planning and urban design looked nice on paper, but in practice when everyone has to get everywhere by car, every new building just makes everyone’s traffic worse. Also, the attempt to commodify development succeeded to a large degree, and as a result most buildings are financial products designed to be cheap, trendy, and only last only the duration of the financing. So more suburbanization just creates ever-increasing congestion and rolling blight.
But just as important, because this new development culture does not make good places, we are stuck with a fixed supply of pre-war places built on a different operating system which are generally occupying the best locations - and those places don’t like new development because it’s so often very low quality compared to the old stuff they live in!
So there is actually a lot of subtle rationality to the NIMBY movement, and while I think that creating housing abundance is more important than re-learning how to make nice places that can scale up, re-learning how to make nice places could help a lot.
I think you’re absolutely right. Yes, we can build more charmless sheet rocked multifamily next to a strip mall, it will just makes those prewar single family neighborhoods that are walkable to a downtown even more valuable and appealing.
This is frustrating. It’s not the buildings in and of themselves - you’re correct that a modern house tends to be much nicer on the inside and for the owner than a pre-war house. The problem is the urban design and urban planning is usually much worse. Two examples:
1. In new neighborhoods the entire street network is designed as a “tree and branches” where all traffic funnels to a small number of “arterial” roads. This forces all traffic to use that small number of roads, creating traffic congestion by design, while also making walking, biking, and transit impractical.
Then adding insult to injury, the few arterial roads are also the only place that non-residential (and sometimes anything other than single-family) development is allowed. So the roads that neighbors depend on to drive fast and cover long distances get extra congested with traffic coming in and out of strip malls and office parks.
Finally because modern development is car-dependent it needs vast parking lots, loading docks, and walls of garage doors etc. So while it’s often nice *inside* it’s also often pretty bland if not ugly *outside*.
All of this means that if you live in the suburbs, more development around you generally makes quality of life drop as pretty forests and farms are replaced by ugly-on-the-outside tract housing and strip malls, and traffic congestion gets worse and worse.
2. In the “urban infill” context modern development does a lot better mostly because the surrounding development is a mix of uses on a well connected street network if not a grid. Both of these things mean the marginal impact of a single project are much lower.
But modern development often falls flat by making such a hard break with the past: a row of bungalows with front porches is interrupted by a giant stucco box dominated by a three car garage in the front. Or at the corner, what was a small retail strip gets replaced all at once by a six story tower with a huge parking garage, dominating the local horizon and creating a large shadow in a neighborhood that didn’t have that issue before.
In this case the problem is most often zoning rules. parking requirements, setbacks, minimum lot sizes etc that make small incremental development non-viable, so the neighborhood becomes supply constrained for a long time. This causes gentrification, then prices reach a breaking point where suddenly it’s worth it to build a giant building with a parking garage to soak up all the unmet demand.
These two scenarios constitute most development across the US today, and together mean that most people’s experience is that nearby development makes life worse, or at least has significant tradeoffs in suddenly and radically changing the character of the community.
By contrast, in the pre-war environment such radical change was very rare and the normal experience was that “development” meant small incremental changes like your neighbors adding a bedroom on their house or putting a carriage unit in the back, or a corner store opening nearby, which meant a little more convenient and a couple more jobs for the neighborhood youth. So most people welcomed development as “forward progress” that made life a little better without radically changing things.
One part of Picard that didn't make sense to me was how the family Picard managed retain their chalet even through the Revolution. Presumably, it should have been redistributed and the Picards chased out by people wearing the WWIII uniforms from Encounter at Farpoint.
"The house lay abandoned and ruined for the next century; eventually the Picards hired caretakers to maintain the property, but it would be generations before they took up residence there again."
Left NIMBYism strikes me as a purity problem. The only type of housing that's acceptable to them is public housing, or at the very worst rent controlled housing. Anything else in their mind risks evil, rapacious developers swooping in to gentrify entire neighborhoods. Other forms of NIMBYism can at least make sense in their selfishness, but this type of obstinacy is mind numbing. I am decidedly not a Star Trek expert, so I have no idea how to continue that analogy, anyone who is can take a shot at it.
I'll be honest, I am not very familiar with Star Trek and didn't realize it was a reference till I got to the comments. The story was still compelling and made his point well. I just figured MY created his own hypothetical world.
Star Trek is pretty popular. My 60 year old mother loves the original series. She's not really the target audience for this post because she's not a socialist and lives in an exurban area with lots of construction already. But I think urban socialists are even more likely than the average person to like Star Trek.
Of course, there’s “Star Trek,” which saw Roddenberry kicked upstairs after two seasons, and then there’s “TNG-era Star Trek,” which began with Roddenberry thinking “oh, now I can really dig in to all of the post-scarcity musings I’ve been sitting on for the past twenty years!” Which is to say, the socialist utopia stuff didn’t really come up in TOS, but Season 1 TNG is utterly soaked in it, and while it would be downplayed somewhat afterward it remained characteristic of the following seasons and series (even if DS9 tried to deconstruct it on occasion).
Thanks for writing something that is (hopefully) likely to appeal to someone who doesn't share many core assumptions with you. The slow boring of hard boards and all that.
“supply has no bearing on rental price because supply is unknown by the landlord as they set their rental price”
I’m sorry, I realize it’s not the point of this article to dunk on this guy but this was so breathtakingly stupid that I had to take a moment to breathe deeply and calm myself. People are literally standing in multi-block lines to view apartment openings in some cities. I’m pretty sure that landlords pay close attention to that sort of thing.
The guy setting prices at the corner gas station doesn't know the supply of oil either. He knows that the gas stations in his area are setting the price between $3.85 and $4.15 and wants to be on the lower side of that range.
The guy renting the apartment doesn't need to know what the supply/demand is - he needs to know what similar apartments are going for and decide where he wants to land in the spread of prices.
Yes, but if you reason from your desired conclusion backwards to your premise, then the argument makes total sense.
I mean this is the basic intuition for “new buildings raise rents” - adding a big number to the comparables supposedly enhances the value of everything nearby.
That isn't my intuition at all about how that works - is there any literature showing new buildings cause existing rents to increase?
I don’t think it’s true, and AFAIK the research rejects it. It’s a left NIMBY talking point. But the “real estate prices are determined by comparables” thing is how they claim it works. New expensive building, higher comps in the neighborhood, higher prices overall.
Comps take into account the quality, age, amenities, etc. An old apartment wouldn't comp at the same rate as a new apartment even if they have the exact same footprint.
Also like, say I don't look at any comparisons whatsoever when I post my condo for rent. But I don't get any applications, so I lower the price until I do get some.
I just incorporated information about supply and demand into the rental price, did I not?
Yeah, this is absolutely 101-level “how do markets work, even if you don’t like them” stuff. You don’t have to sign on to all of Hayek’s _pre_scriptions to acknowledge that his _de_scriptions were largely accurate!
Markets are wonderous discovery mechanisms.
Yeah I went looking for the author cuz I was like "wat" and apparently he's a PhD candidate or post-doc in urban planning, which I thought was weird because so much of what he wrote is unrelated to how being in the business of being a landlord actually works. I thought you'd have to know that stuff to be involved in urban planning.
As Zvi once pointed out, there are some possibilities:
1) new construction might make some landlords who have been vastly undercharging realize their mistake. It seems unlikely that a landlord who undercharges is doing so mistakenly, though -- more likely they have a reason like "This way I don't have to bother with changing tenants every couple of years"
2) some people are in fact idiots who think that this is how pricing works
You can't do much about 1) but there's handy thing called a "market" that generally causes people in 2) to go broke and leave the market, so it takes care of itself.
Why bother going to Starfleet Academy when there is holodeck abundance? Who would want to deal with actual humans when such a technology exists? I for one would spend my entire life having deeply meaningful and intellectually rich trists with absolutely stunning holograms that would play chess just poorly enough to let me win occasionally and turn the entire process into a compelling erotic game. Said holograms would also love all of my SB comments and would help me launch my own “substack” where fawning subscribers would cheer me on and offer up their nubile charms.
The holodecks seem supply limited to me. Just going off my memory of the show. I don’t know why they would be, probably a lot of resources are needed to contain all the rogue AIs they generate
Hopefully it’s due to the labor-intensive, extremely thorough cleaning and disinfection process that gets performed between uses.
Yup, they show this in Lower Decks and it is gross. But probably the most important job in the federation!
You can't set phasers to "sterilize "?
https://i.imgur.com/MeWbc3v.gif
Given the sparse apparent population of earth & the tiny size of Starfleet even late in the Dominion War when the Dominion is threatening core Federation planets like Betazed, I suspect the vast majority of the population have retreated to holodeck pursuits but they aren't shown in-show because that's too depressing.
It's either that or show-writers aren't good at understanding numbers & what full-scale war mobilization would look like for a society with replicators, and it's definitely not the second one :p
Raising kids is easier now than it has been for most of history and yet people are having fewer kids. Assuming that trend continues, the federation might need to add new planets and their populations just to maintain their current population.
The Federation gets to exist in a liminal space where mid-20th-century-liberalism never runs into serious reality problems, so the composition of the Federation is similar to 1950s America.
In our timeline, it currently looks like in the year 2300 most of humanity will be of African descent, and most of the rest are hyperreligious groups like Orthodox Jews & Amish.
Unlikely. Modern people have much higher real incomes than people in the early 1900s, and thus could easily afford a 1900s-like package of goods and services with plenty of income to spare to raise a large brood of children who (thanks to modern technological and medical advances) will be easier to raise and cause less heartbreak by dying.
People are choosing to have many fewer kids because of some complicated combination of:
(1) high-status people model low fertility / high fertility is coded as low status
(2) high-status people are high-education and therefore everyone is encouraged to spend their highest fertility years on education
(3) people might lose status by owning a smaller house & having more kids
(4) Netflix & international travel are both very fun, and so compete with "joy of child-rearing", especially for the anxious, risk-averse, low-energy, or borderline-depressed
Under the conditions of modernity, the groups that have a lot of children are the groups that choose to have a lot of children, so the religious. The future will be very weird to us if secular culture doesn't find a way to pull itself out of its low fertility spiral.
It appears to be canon that Starfleet officers at least prioritize their careers over having kids and don’t get married until middle age. Both Jake Sisko and William Crusher were only children after all.
That's not what we see in the show -- family sizes are small (below replacement) and the Earth is sparsely populated.
It's unclear what the population of Earth is, but it's probably less than 10 billion.
Oddly, in the alternate timeline where the Borg take over Earth, they only have 9 billion drones on the planet:
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Population
Star Fleet family sizes appear very small -- when crew members mention siblings, the framing often implies that its their only sibling.
Later movies and shows have shown UFP cities, but nothing that would match having large populations AFAIK? Memory Alpha seems to think that Earth's population was never stated but populations of Federations worlds are in the millions or low billions if mentioned at all.
So wait, are you saying Star Trek isn't realistic?
Okay Lt. Barclay
No. They would teasingly pushback on SB comments just enough to make you an ever-improving neoliberal. :)
I pity whoever has to clean up those holodecks. Presumably excretions from real people don’t automatically disappear.
I wouldn't take the ~~experience machine~~ ~~metaverse~~ holodeck.
I absolutely adore Twitter and the funny, brilliant I interact with there, and similarly get value out of Discord, Reddit, HN, etc. -- but it could never replace IRL for me, only complement it.
I would absolutely not want to waste my whole life in a holodeck. I would join starfleet and explore the galaxy.
For a more serious meditation on post-holodeck societies and the nature of meaning in a post-scarcity society, I recommend Lady of Mazes.
The other possibility is to create new axes of status. Different genres of music and different sports produce their own status hierarchies, and to the people that care about one, the others are basically invisible. If you have enough status hierarchies, then it’s not obviously impossible that everyone could be near the top in one of the few they care about.
The pickleball status hierarchy is an interesting example, as it it a new sport. There is absolutely a county-level pickleball status hierarchy on south side Atlanta, though reputations of good players can spill over into adjacent counties, eg Fayette to Coweta, where they have better facilities. Recently, the “pro” tour visited peachtree city. One of my friends hosted a professional female player, presumably because only the very top pickleball pros can afford a hotel room. One of the top male players has a reputation for screwing every woman in sight. My joke is he gets all the tail because he can afford the hot tub “suite” at the Holiday Inn.
This has been an issue I've long debated and while I agree that there is definitely a great deal of room to make things better or worse by having many or few axes of status I'm quite doubtful that the truly utopian vision you suggest is possible.
I mean, in a certain useless sense everyone could be at the top by being in their own individual status hierarchy but short of us all reaching Buddha style enlightenment (or, wireheading which I think is the right way long term) that's not going to offer satisfaction.
Given current human psychology being at the top means having ppl spend time treating you with respect. Sure, you can be an emminent professor and enjoy your time on the pickle ball court but no one is going to feel much satisfaction (life level as opposed to a bit of fun) at being the pickle ball best amoung a bunch of ppl who don't really care about being the best at pickle ball.
At the end of the day our concern for status is closely connected with our reproductive drives and while we can fool them to an extent the kind of things that make us feel good about status look alot like the kind of things that work well for dating (ppl talking to you and treating you a certain way). It's just not possible for everyone to have that...someone is still the person in the group at the bar all their preferred partners or ppl they want respect from are the least interested in talking to.
I don't literally mean that it's all about the sex but it's about being treated as desireable in a way that limits on time and the desire to interact regularly with the same ppl makes fundamentally rivalrous. Maybe your community is star trek fan fic but you can't trick your psych into thinking that being the world's best Borg/data LOTR crossover writer is a big deal if it's not a major focus in your community.
The question is how far away from that cap are we.
it’s not quite that simple. women continue to pursue status after menopause, and not just on behalf of their grandchildren. men continue to pursue status even if they are impotent and not just on behalf of their offspring. i have no illusions that i will ever get laid on account of my SB comments, yet i enjoy this discourse even though 90% of the people in this space are male and it holds no erotic interest for me
Yes, apparently I wasn't clear enough when I said it's not literally all about the sex.
But the point being is that status is an incentive to get reproductively valuable resources *like* sexual interest but also position, food etc for our offspring/relatives etc... I didn't mean it's literally sex or your target sex has to be aware of this kind of status but merely to evoke the fact that what makes u feel good is ppl treating you in ways that are alot like the kind of things which attract sexual interest (which are just like the things that help your kids get food/position when older bc that future ability is an imp facet of what makes ppl attractive)
Since we are no longer in an evolutionary environment those signals can be tricked to a degree. But it for the same reason it's obvious everyone can't feel like they are on top of the sexual heap the fact that status tends to work similarly (ie it's an incentive to get us to do things that give us a greater frac of rivalrous goods) means you can't hijack it to the extent where everyone feels at the very top.
In other words evo ensures we care both about being on top of a status hierarchy and how much others care about that hierarchy so you can't make everyone super satisfied by making them all the most important person on some super narrow Wikipedia page since they'll know no one else is super impressed (they might be interested and respect your knowledge but they are also the top expert on their page they think is more interesting).
Worse, the more you give ppl the ability to shove off a status hierarchy they are on the bottom of the less cohesive social groups become and you lose serious long term connections. But if you have long term connections you'll compare yourself and can be found wanting.
Don't get me wrong we can improve things alot by changing these things. But we can't hope you get to a point where everyone feels on top of the world.
But I think it's a real interesting question what kind of arrangement maximizes utility here. Seems like there are a few relevant parameters: group/status hierarchy sizes, number of hierarchies a person participates in and ease of joining and dropping out.
At one end of you split everyone into 150 person tribes permanently it probably feels just as good to be chief in your tribe as it does to be a rockstar. Problem is that being at the bottom is utter shit.
Ok, so you open things up and try and spread ppl across many hierarchies and make it easier to move between them so ppl can all find what they are good at.
But this obviously isn't so good at the extreme either as you end up in the situation where everyone is the head honcho for their favorite Wikipedia page but no one else really finds it that impressive (after all they have their own and that interests them more). Worse you get no real sense of community because it's much too easy to leave.
I'd love to see some sociology done on this and it should be relatively easy since the obvious study group is academics (you can look at very specialized vs broad fields etc).
I think these various kinds of status will end up being correlated with each other in real life, unfortunately.
I don't think they are *that* correlated even now. Low income communities have their own status hierarchies, and within those communities relatively poor and less-educated people can still be high status in the eyes of the people whose opinions matter to them.
Of course there are some constants in status, mostly that people with high social-emotional intelligence tend to be higher status than those that don't, and of course there are material factors as well. But status hierarchies are usually pretty specific to your interests and location rather than broad structures including everyone.
The degree of attention people pay to local versus national/international status hierarchies is not fixed. One of the worst things about the internet (and tv before it) is they divert attention from local status hierarchies to national ones, where most people will inevitably be losers.
I disagree with this, it can easy to be cool within a small online group by being the most knowledgeable person on a niche forum or the funniest guy in a groupchat.
There are churches, too.
correct. if the holograms are sufficiently enticing and the risk of the system going offline is trivial, actual human status would be a fools game
Holo-addiction is a disease.
Holo-addiction would be pathological on a starship exploring new worlds where there is limited space for crew, meaning there are limited human hours to perform mission critical tasks and keep the ship running. Starfleet has obvious reasons for not allowing holodeck abundance on ships that perform difficult missions.
Holodeck immersion on earth would be much less problematic. What economic function do earthlings really perform in a post scarcity society? I have not watched every episode, but I suspect that is one of the many plot holes in Star Trek.
I think there's a strong case for starship holodeck abolition, given how many times the holodeck almost destroyed the Enterprise or endangered members of its crew.
Mothers Against Deep (Space) 'Decking?
Futurama has a plotline about essentially holodeck abolition when Fry tries to date the robo head of Lucy Liu.
Mothers Against Deep Space 'Decking is endorsed by the Space Pope.
Shorn of any economic or utilitarian purpose and immune from want, holo deprived earthlings might use their replicators to synthesize booze and fentanyl, then to replace their livers before they failed. Still, acute overdoses would sometimes occur, resulting in deaths of despair. Liberals would argue for bringing back holodecks while conservatives bickered between smashing replicators altogether and preemptive war against the Romulans.
Or worse, they'll import headset-based video games from Risa.
What is dark about wanting to trist with stunning, young women?
"... wanting to trist with stunning, young women?"
Right, but what if they set their phasers to "kill" instead of "stun"?
Seems like that depends on whether you actually mean "trist" (To trust, have faith in) or you mean "tryst" (A prearranged meeting or assignation, now especially between lovers to meet at a specific place and time)?
“…how do you know people today aren’t just highly convincing holograms or that we don’t just live in a simulation?”
Descartes dispensed with that a long time ago.
... by invoking the existence and omnibenevolence of God. If you don't accept either of his proofs of God's existence (and they're both pretty shaky), then it's still a live question.
He used other proofs, such as the idea that if one could find a triangle whose internal angles did not sum to 180 degrees, that would be evidence for a powerful deceiver.
And General Relativity shows that we live in a non-Euclidean universe, in which such triangles can be found. Hmmmm. I guess that checks out...
How did Descartes do that?
It's a short work. Dunno how many pages, but I remember it being a slender, cheap paperback when I had to read it for intro to philosophy.* (It's available for free on the tubes these days, of course, but I'm old enough that I went to school in the pre-internet days. Not literally the pre-internet days, but the days when the only people using the internet were a handful of CS undergrads and a TA or two in the SPARC lab.) It's worth reading in full, and, frankly, I'm not in the best circumstances at the moment to do it even partial justice.
Another comment here mentioned the hand-wavy way that Descartes demonstrated that God exists. True to an extent, but he was a man of his time, and I'm willing to cut him some slack on that point. In any case, by the final meditation he mostly gets away from that and gets going on what I suppose we'd call today 'mind-body duality.'
.
*It was a while before I figured it out because it wasn't billed this way, but this intro phil course was actually an ethics for engineers course. Another of the readings was the novel Ringworld.
Worth noting that he gives the same sequence of arguments in two places: the standalone Meditations, originally written in Latin, and the introduction to Discourse On The Method, originally written in French. Both are available in translation, and the introduction to Discourse is available without the rest of the book (which I haven't read; I believe it's about his work in physics and other natural science, and hence only really interesting to historians of science). The only substantial difference between the two is the argument he uses for the existence of God.
It's been a long time since I read either the Meditations or the Discourse on the Method, but IIRC his argument was "God exists, because [logical sleight of hand]; God would not deceive us to such a great extent; therefore we are not living in a simulation". After the brilliance of the first two Meditations it's a bit of a let-down, frankly.
Seems a bit cocky to think he could know what God would or wouldn't do
There is a category of leftist that thinks trade-offs are something that will be abolished when capitalism is abolished. End capitalism and the horn of plenty will be unleashed. You tend to see a lot of this nonsense when talking about global warming and agriculture.
It's a way of coping with scarcity being a fact of life. It is emotionally easier to deal with not getting something you want because there isn't enough of it if you believe that it is being kept from you by nefarious people.
Look guys, they can just be wrong without doing armchair psychoanalysis.
When people are persistently wrong for over a century despite ample objective evidence, some psychoanalysis is probably appropriate.
I am sure that there are some people who believe they know how to produce and allocate goods and services more efficiently than market forces, and they indeed are just wrong, but also, most people do not think that way. Goods and services have become a lot less scarce in the last 200-300 years, but the envy, jealousy, and tribal suspicions humans developed in a much higher scarcity environment have not gone away, which impacts the desires people have and how they think about why those desires are sometimes not fulfilled.
I really appreciate the effort to bring YIMBY nerds and Star Trek nerds together. Who knows what power such a mighty coalition could yield!
We saw it. Build new backyards. Star Trek II and III. It was called The Genesis Project. Don't buy a house on any new planet from Genesis Realty.
I agree even though I don’t get most of the Star Trek references. I deal with NIMBYs in my professional life and am always looking for ways to frame these issues so as to make them compelling to normal people. Saving this post!
Funnily enough it seems like it would be even harder to get more housing built in MY's Trek world. At least in a market system, homeowners benefit from upzoning due to the land they sit on becoming more valuable. In socialist utopia, it is pure loss, no gain. Market incentives matter!
I applaud the point that zoning matters even in utopia. However you sure went to extremes to appeal to the Star Wars socialists in the room. I imagine you are sensitive to the increasing tension within the housing movement between the Left YIMBYs and the mkt YIMBYs. My concern is by turning apologist to the Left camp and bending over backwards to squeeze abundant housing into a Lefty alignment, we risk the effectiveness and potential of abundant housing at large. Take California's AB 2011 which you recently cheered, which allows increased density along commercial corridors. The fine print is the required use of union labor (as if zoning operates independent of construction costs) and the requirement to subsidize 15% of the constructed units at below market rents. Both of these measures blunt the upzoning upside such that it will not bring the change YIMBYs of all flavors would like to see. Politics is a compromise, and up to this point unions have been fighting housing for their self interested (state mandated) seat at the table. Zoning is important, and coalition building across the galaxy is great, but we can't lose sight of the non-zoning factors at play, nor of the power of econ 101 argument at large when applied to housing, neither of which we should shy away from or tip toe around if we want real change. Construction costs (and regulatory time to approval) matter too.
In CA and the Boston area zoning is overwhelmingly the binding constraint on development. By far the most effective way to project land value is zoned development rights, because developers almost always build right up to their allowances.
At the current margins construction costs are not primary drivers of prices.
Is this true? I remember a long anecdote a few years back in Conor Dougherty's book Golden Gates about CA *finally* passing a huge, unprecedented funding package for affordable housing (coupled either with zoning reforms in the relevant locations or else it was on land the gov't already owned,
can't remember) that turned out to be basically useless because construction costs (I think likewise using union labor) were so high that they could only build a teeny fraction of the housing there was demand for. Sorry that I can't remember any of the numbers off the top of my head!
Obviously this was specifically for affordable housing so they couldn't recoup costs in rents, but the numbers were truly staggering - my impression at the time was that even in CA a perfect left-YIMBY storm couldn't overcome construction costs.
Revealed preferences indicate that it is very much true in terms of the overwhelming driver of land prices is the number of square feet or number units allowed by zoning. In Boston and coastal CA developers nearly always build right up to the limit they are legally allowed and often spend time and money to get variances to build more.
Construction costs are very real. "Affordable" housing, aka deed restricted, government funded, is approaching $1m per unit in CA. Insane.
Don't mean to diminish zoning. This isn't to say we should turn a blind eye to costs, if wish to amplify supply.
California actually passed two versions of the commercial upzoning law, one requires union labor (needed to get the various powerful union construction lobbies on board) and the other that requires BMR targets that are similar to the builders remedy, which is currently going gangbusters in Southern California as more cities fall out of line:
https://twitter.com/IDoTheThinking/status/1580363193779486721?t=fibepqVRNxs3Ow5fS-HY_A&s=19
I agree with your overall point, but your use of "Star Wars" rather than "Star Trek" precludes me from hearting your comment.
I respect that. One must draw the line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3RNsZvdYZQ&t=100s
“Construction costs (and regulatory time to approval) matter too”
It’s pretty easy to see the straight line from government support of labor unions to a less prosperous society.
Definitely my blind spot!
It's funny, Kevin, don't know if you're aware but confusing Wars with Trek is like the worst possible mistake in that universe. It's worse than going to Talos IV without a permit.
Don't mean to offend! That's what I get for feeling a need to comment at 4am west coast time. There should be special zoning for ppl like me!
Well, some might zone you in Rura Penthe, but I'm not that harsh. Maybe Ceti Alpha V. ;-)
12 “builders remedy” projects on the docket in Santa Monica, which get ministerial approval under new rules in CA. https://twitter.com/emily_sawicki/status/1580360066300928002?s=46&t=cunpjqGu_NKMldriZ4dG1g
SF has to submit a compliant housing element by next Jan, or else we get to build over NIMBY objections there.
Love to see it.
Rant: This has basically nothing to do with your post but every time I see the Bay Area (and San Francisco) from a plane I am reminded how difficult it it would be to explain to someone from outside of the US that it has a housing crisis. They would point at all the empty land and vast expanses of single family homes and think you could just tear 20% of that down and replace it with some bigger buildings and problem solved. Anyone who e.g. had been in charge of the city of Istanbul (which has plenty of its own problems) would fix the problem in a year or two (if given the same policy levers).
Those policy levers (macro and micro) are of course the key challenge but I find that it's good to remind oneself and others about the sheer madness of it all. Undermining American growth and prosperity for decades and continuously ratcheting up inequality all so that they don't have to deal with a bit of change or see a tall building in the distance.
What's even crazier about it is that you wouldn't have to forcibly relocate people and have the government do all the work. If you just let people who wanted to make a crap ton of money with their property redevelop it, you could have that happen exclusively by people happily making decisions to make themselves richer using private capital!
Yes, 100%.
Left NIMBYism makes a lot of sense if you don’t think people’s desires to relocate are important. Price controls or public housing avoid the cost burden and displacement problems for incumbents, which are what “the housing crisis” means to them.
There might be some concern for children born and raised somewhere to eventually get their own households, but organic population growth is a smaller and less disruptive demand pressure to meet than what is actually happening on desirable and/or “tech” regions over the last decade.
I really want to have a "dislike" button on substack. I would press it repeatedly for this post for the sole reason of linking to that poorly-written, poorly-argued, economically illiterate post by Kevin Rogan.
I read it [ed: the post by Rogan], then read it again, desperately searching for a thread of logic I could follow from sentence to sentence. Instead, I stumbled blindly (along with the author, it appears) to the predetermined conclusion that supply doesn't matter to housing prices. A tiring journey for so early in the morning.
Would the dislike button work faster than the like button or would we also have to wait several seconds (or minutes) for it to take effect?
I actually got a lot out of it! My reading guide would be:
Rogan misunderstands how incentives work in a fundamental way, thinking of them more like laws. This is a very common mistake, which I have seen even among some successful students in mid-level undergraduate Econ (which is as far as I have taken). BUT his post does offer some mechanisms/theory for why we might expect housing prices to respond slowly to changes in supply (basically, individual actors up and down the supply chain can’t predict the future). I don’t know to what extent even that conclusion will hold once you account for some of the things he forgets, but he at least added some nuance to my mental model.
The conclusion is obviously silly. There’s value in the piece.
There is no value in that essay: The author is ignorant.
He writes that an apartment property, “may change hands many time over its life as well, further occluding any information about initial selling price.” He fundamentally misunderstands how a commercial asset is valued. In brief, a commercial asset such as an apartment building has the potential to generate income, and the amount of income potential determines the price. The cost of the asset when built is irrelevant to that calculation.
This type of post is the downside of writing four posts a week. It could easily be written in a couple hours as it required basically no research. I would rather Matt write fewer posts and put as much useful data in his work as Milan does. The only alternative is hiring more interns and, if Matt is up to 13k subscribers, he can certainly drop several grand a month to do that.
My attempt at sarcasm appears to have been lost in translation. I actually like Matt's post, and the linked-to post by Rogan was the one I disliked.
That’s when I wish I had a grin button, because I totally got your sarcasm.
Matt’s post is fun but it didn’t tell me anything i didn’t already know.
I dunno I think this type of thing is very useful. Leftists in US seem to swing wildly between advocating central planning by government economic specialists and loud comments about how much they hate ‘economists’.
They reconcile that by contending that it's the wrong economists running things.
Good use of sci-fi lite to make a polemical point in a vivid way. Like Le Guin, and that's high praise.
I look forward to your sci-fi alt history of 2016, "The Ones Who Walk Away from O'Malley."
Matt, something I don’t hear you dig into much is the history of how we got here. Up until the Great Depression, US cities boomed and tearing down or moving small buildings to put up bigger ones was seen as a sign of progress and generally lauded. It happened everywhere all the time.
FDR went to great lengths to remake the housing and development market, specifically with a Marxist view that the goal was to equitably distribute people across the landscape. The Great Depression was so bad it killed off nearly all developers and construction practice from pre-1930, the planners spent the 1930s writing all these new rules with minimal testing (as so little was built). Finally, after the war we basically re-started with an entirely new operating system for how we make places.
The problem today is in large part: post-war development doesn’t scale well! “Modern” city planning and urban design looked nice on paper, but in practice when everyone has to get everywhere by car, every new building just makes everyone’s traffic worse. Also, the attempt to commodify development succeeded to a large degree, and as a result most buildings are financial products designed to be cheap, trendy, and only last only the duration of the financing. So more suburbanization just creates ever-increasing congestion and rolling blight.
But just as important, because this new development culture does not make good places, we are stuck with a fixed supply of pre-war places built on a different operating system which are generally occupying the best locations - and those places don’t like new development because it’s so often very low quality compared to the old stuff they live in!
So there is actually a lot of subtle rationality to the NIMBY movement, and while I think that creating housing abundance is more important than re-learning how to make nice places that can scale up, re-learning how to make nice places could help a lot.
I think you’re absolutely right. Yes, we can build more charmless sheet rocked multifamily next to a strip mall, it will just makes those prewar single family neighborhoods that are walkable to a downtown even more valuable and appealing.
This is frustrating. It’s not the buildings in and of themselves - you’re correct that a modern house tends to be much nicer on the inside and for the owner than a pre-war house. The problem is the urban design and urban planning is usually much worse. Two examples:
1. In new neighborhoods the entire street network is designed as a “tree and branches” where all traffic funnels to a small number of “arterial” roads. This forces all traffic to use that small number of roads, creating traffic congestion by design, while also making walking, biking, and transit impractical.
Then adding insult to injury, the few arterial roads are also the only place that non-residential (and sometimes anything other than single-family) development is allowed. So the roads that neighbors depend on to drive fast and cover long distances get extra congested with traffic coming in and out of strip malls and office parks.
Finally because modern development is car-dependent it needs vast parking lots, loading docks, and walls of garage doors etc. So while it’s often nice *inside* it’s also often pretty bland if not ugly *outside*.
All of this means that if you live in the suburbs, more development around you generally makes quality of life drop as pretty forests and farms are replaced by ugly-on-the-outside tract housing and strip malls, and traffic congestion gets worse and worse.
2. In the “urban infill” context modern development does a lot better mostly because the surrounding development is a mix of uses on a well connected street network if not a grid. Both of these things mean the marginal impact of a single project are much lower.
But modern development often falls flat by making such a hard break with the past: a row of bungalows with front porches is interrupted by a giant stucco box dominated by a three car garage in the front. Or at the corner, what was a small retail strip gets replaced all at once by a six story tower with a huge parking garage, dominating the local horizon and creating a large shadow in a neighborhood that didn’t have that issue before.
In this case the problem is most often zoning rules. parking requirements, setbacks, minimum lot sizes etc that make small incremental development non-viable, so the neighborhood becomes supply constrained for a long time. This causes gentrification, then prices reach a breaking point where suddenly it’s worth it to build a giant building with a parking garage to soak up all the unmet demand.
These two scenarios constitute most development across the US today, and together mean that most people’s experience is that nearby development makes life worse, or at least has significant tradeoffs in suddenly and radically changing the character of the community.
By contrast, in the pre-war environment such radical change was very rare and the normal experience was that “development” meant small incremental changes like your neighbors adding a bedroom on their house or putting a carriage unit in the back, or a corner store opening nearby, which meant a little more convenient and a couple more jobs for the neighborhood youth. So most people welcomed development as “forward progress” that made life a little better without radically changing things.
One part of Picard that didn't make sense to me was how the family Picard managed retain their chalet even through the Revolution. Presumably, it should have been redistributed and the Picards chased out by people wearing the WWIII uniforms from Encounter at Farpoint.
Presumably because it was a ruin at the time:
"The house lay abandoned and ruined for the next century; eventually the Picards hired caretakers to maintain the property, but it would be generations before they took up residence there again."
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_Picard
Left NIMBYism strikes me as a purity problem. The only type of housing that's acceptable to them is public housing, or at the very worst rent controlled housing. Anything else in their mind risks evil, rapacious developers swooping in to gentrify entire neighborhoods. Other forms of NIMBYism can at least make sense in their selfishness, but this type of obstinacy is mind numbing. I am decidedly not a Star Trek expert, so I have no idea how to continue that analogy, anyone who is can take a shot at it.
I fear that "rationalist Star Trek analogy substack post" isn't the ideal genre for getting through to NIMBY types
I'll be honest, I am not very familiar with Star Trek and didn't realize it was a reference till I got to the comments. The story was still compelling and made his point well. I just figured MY created his own hypothetical world.
Star Trek is pretty popular. My 60 year old mother loves the original series. She's not really the target audience for this post because she's not a socialist and lives in an exurban area with lots of construction already. But I think urban socialists are even more likely than the average person to like Star Trek.
Of course, there’s “Star Trek,” which saw Roddenberry kicked upstairs after two seasons, and then there’s “TNG-era Star Trek,” which began with Roddenberry thinking “oh, now I can really dig in to all of the post-scarcity musings I’ve been sitting on for the past twenty years!” Which is to say, the socialist utopia stuff didn’t really come up in TOS, but Season 1 TNG is utterly soaked in it, and while it would be downplayed somewhat afterward it remained characteristic of the following seasons and series (even if DS9 tried to deconstruct it on occasion).
Thanks for writing something that is (hopefully) likely to appeal to someone who doesn't share many core assumptions with you. The slow boring of hard boards and all that.
Maybe the French wine country is still sparsely populated in utopia, but at least they were able to overcome enough local objections to build out Marin County a bit: https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/jkvb09/screenshot_of_final_scene_from_star_trek/