I think many people on the Center Left are terrified of being perceived as “not caring about the environment.” I agree that repealing seems to be the best option. It is not clear that NEPA actually helps the natural environment very much.
The best counter-argument is that repeal would require Congressional legislation, which would be very difficult to achieve. Reforming it would likely only require Presidential action because it is the federal bureaucracy that transformed NEPA into Frankenstein’s monster. At the very least, the President could exempt certain projects from NEPA requirements, while a more substantial reform is being worked on.
To be clear, I am not saying that Noah Smith believes something different than he writes. What I am talking about is why they all seem to be afraid to take their complaints about NEPA to its logical consequence: repeal.
Thanks - that makes sense to me as an explanation for why it hasn’t been repealed, but not why these articles don’t call for it to be repealed, or at least mention that as a possible, if politically difficult goal.
Why haven’t Noah smith, Matt y, Ezra Klein, etc. written an article calling for repeal and explaining how it might happen? All these folks (Ezra maybe a bit less) are happy to take on “environmentalist” and groups causes.
I don’t think they’re scared! Which is why it seems likely that I’m missing something by thinking repeal would be worth exploring.
No we WANT externalities to be considered. It is inefficient to build a powerline where it causes more ecological damage than it is worth. We just need external costs to be properly estimated so they can be rationally balanced against benefits to produce the greatest NPV.
There is no evidence that NEPA comes anywhere near accurate to measuring external costs. The review process itself imposes external costs that do not need to be there.
The government is very bad at rationally balancing costs and benefits. And they spend a lot of money and time delivering no results.
Not sure, but for budgetary purposes, I'd say finance it with taxes, not borrowing. Now I could see some park investments having NPV > 0, things done now that avoid costs later on.
Yes, they are scared. Entire careers in the intelligentsia are based on status within the group.
They know that calling for an abolition of NEPA violates group norms within Left-of-Center college-educated professionals.
Whoever is the first high-profile person on the Left who advocates for the abolition of NEPA will likely be attacked by the entire group. It potentially ruins their career by ruining their social status within the group.
Unfortunately, it is this way for dozens of issues.
At some point, attitudes will shift (hopefully), but it is dangerous to be the first one who sticks their neck out to tell the entire group that they are wrong.
Unfortunately, that is how group-think mentalities work. And politics and ideology are where group-think mentalities are most prevalent.
I never said that there is anything evil going on. Yes, you are correct that this is how all organizations work, but remember that we are not talking about one specific organization. All of the writers mentioned are in different organizations or are independent actors.
I think “group-think mentality” that is inherent to ideology better explains the psychology rather than how organizations work.
There is this tendency to try to lump them as "other" and I think it is important to recognize this is how groups we are all in operate. It takes a lot of work to change direction. No need to demonize; you said, "Entire careers in the intelligentsia are based on status within the group."
These are just people trying to pay for preschool, trying to do good work, trying to help everyone. Same as the dude repairing your car, same as the grocery store clerk, etc. This isn't some weird group of people off in the corner scheming, they are you.
Of course. Some actions by individuals impose costs on others in situations in whihc the imposer has no incentive to optimize his benefit with the cost to the other party. Negative externalities exist and ordinary tort law is inadequate to deal with some of them. It makes total economic sense, is efficient, growth promoting for a public body to force the source of the negative externality to take account of the harm done. The trick is to correctly measure the harm and create the lowest cost incentive to "internalize" the externality and to do so at low administrative cost
Maybe I'm wrong but I've been assuming that NEPA is just one thing the EPA does. You are correct I did not address NEPA as a specific set of provisions. I don't know enough about it.
I was making the general point that consideration of externalities of an action (building a transmission line, for example) is proper, it contributes to increasing the total NPV of the action. It is the WAY "NEPA" forces that consideration that's the problem. I mistakenly interpreted "repeal NEPA" as meaning why not eliminate consideration of externalities.
Yeah, seems Noah is missing the obvious solution on this one:
> More state capacity, in the form of bureaucrats who are able to suss out this kind of opportunistic anti-development misinformation, is the obvious solution to this problem.
No, seriously, more bureaucrats to solve the red tape problem is actually the opposite of the most obvious solution here.
“The first challenge is personnel: government pay has not kept up with private pay, and the public workforce has not kept up with the workload; public-sector work is instead increasingly privatized, raising costs.’
I’m a living example of this. I retired after 29 years came back as a consultant (because they were hamstrung by the legislature to hire permanent replacement positions), and I’m making 50% more than when I left. And if you’re wondering why I stayed 29 years at crap wages, I really liked my job and it came with a secure pension, like no other private engineering firm offered.
The same holds true with USFS Fire. In semi-retirement from the private sector, I worked six seasons for the USFS, for wages barely above the poverty line. I could afford to because I didn’t need the money. Now that I no longer work seasonally for the USFS, it will pay me twice as much for wildfire work. As with many things, the privatizing of formerly government work simply adds greater cost to essential/necessary work. This trend began under Saint Reagan. It doesn’t surprise me his name adorns the Washington, DC International Airport; it’s a Reaganomics temple.
Maybe. But then most firms match 401k money similar to the way employee & State make equal contributions to the pension system here in WI and both have health plans. Although state plans are typically cheaper for the employee the benefits were mostly a wash. And of course there are no bonuses.
At the risk of being the NIMBY of the group, which I'm most certainly generally not, I must push back on the Snail Darter thing. I grew up and was living in the Tennessee Valley at the time and remember the process of seeing the Little T being lost. The Little T for those who don't know was a beautiful river flowing from the Smokey Mountains into the Tennessee River. It was reportedly one of the best trout streams in the U.S. It was also the last flowing, not damed river in the Tennessee River system. Recall that these dams were built for a combination of power production and flood control. At that point, in addition to all the other dams, the TVA had built nuclear reactors at Watts Bar, Sequoyah, and Brown's Ferry. The Tellico Dam (the at the time proposed dam of the Little T) would contribute a pittance to the overall power capacity. For flooding it was a total red herring since the much larger Fort Loudon and Watts Bar dams could contain far more capacity than the Tellico was going to. Despite that, the TVA wanted to do the project. Why? Because it was in the original plan and nobody was going to stop them. A useless dam that was a net negative got built.
I'll admit the Snail Darter, irrespective of its status as a species, was a dumb reason to stop a dam, but almost everybody in the Tennessee Valley region around the Little T was against this project going forward and the Snail Darter was the only legal leg we had to stand on. The reality is that if it had been delayed for 10 or so more years, it wouldn't have been built.
I should add that, despite the way it sounds, I'm not anti-TVA - just this project. The TVA probably did more than anything to help East Tennessee (loyal to the Union in the civil war, but suffered along with the rest of the Confederacy after) recover from it's long poverty. One can see the results if you look at the difference between the devastation of western North Carolina and East Tennessee due to Hurricane Helene. The both received similar rainfall, but the dams in TN (which had been rejected in NC) saved the day.
Yeah, but even you admit that the snail darter was a bullshit reason to stop the dam. You gave plenty of better reasons!
There should be some way, and possibly a requirement, to independently assess various projects midstream. Like I’m for the interstate highway system, but it was ridiculous that they ever wanted to build I-40 through Overton Park in Memphis, too.
I plead guilty. Truthfully, everybody but a few deluded enviro types knew it was a bullshit reason, but it was the only tool in the toolbox that was working at the time.
Similar stories to yours in my adopted hometowns of NYC and Boston. The infamous Robert Moses plan to build I-5 and route it through NYC's Greenwich Village and Boston's plan to build the Southwest Expressway through the South End. These are two of the most iconic city neighborhoods in the US that would have been destroyed by those plans.
But, all these examples illustrate the tension between preservation and progress that makes the N/YIMBY debate so difficult to navigate.
My experience with immigration in the construction business is that low cost workers displace and then replace native skilled construction workers. At this point it is difficult to find native carpenters ,plumbers and roofers as there is no career path for them to learn and prosper. When I was 18 back in the 70s construction jobs were plentiful and there were few illegals or none from what I recall .The H1B process could end with the same results in high tech if it is not managed correctly.
I am a STEM professional who is involved in hiring decisions, including H1-B candidates. I am also married to a STEM professional who has hired a foreign born/H1-B worker, so I feel very familiar with this topic.
You concerns about undocumented workers taking over STEM fields is unfounded. By and large H1-B employees are specialized and require higher levels of education. They are technology workers, doctors, bench scientists, and that, by definition of the H1-B visa, fill roles that cannot be filled by a suitable local candidate. Generally speaking, these are long term and permanent full-time roles.
These roles have very little in common with the skilled trades, such as carpenters, roofers, etc. Yes, I agree that f
Yes, I agree that it can be harder to find native born tradesman. It seems that fewer teenagers choose vocational education or find meaningful summer work in the skilled trades. That said, I don't hear any complaints from the skilled tradesman I associate with, one of whom is my step brother, who works in residential construction. If anything, they're more upset that their skilled foreign born tradesman, who may not be documented, are under threat of deportation in a very tight labor market.
Well I am not against the illegals but at the same time there is a price to be paid and it is what my post was about. So yes they can be hard workers and are hard to replace but also they can displace legal citizens and disrupt the job/training supply chain leaving us with no options. Should be competitive wages to attract Americans and if there is still a shortage then bring in immigrant labor. That is not how things are working currently.
Correct, there's neither adequate wages, adequate training, adequate labor supply, or a mechanism for bringing in skilled labor from elsewhere via a visa program. These things have been known for years. Readers of this newsletter should be familiar with why. What policy changes do you think are necessary to address these problems?
So for the construction industry this problem of replacement has taken 30 years or more to get where it is today. If we pulled out all illegals tomorrow the industry would collapse .This is why I say the high tech H1B system needs to be done with care. I do not have the answer as to how specifically but I do think letting the industry police itself would be a mistake. They will flood the system with the cheapest labor they can get and 20 years from now some career paths will not be realistic for Americans. This leads to resentment and political upheaval.
If you make it mandatory for residency to become available quickly, then the H1B cannot be used to decrease wages (they can always switch jobs if they are underpaid). Once they are residents with top 5% income, they are likely to become citizens as well. Our overall technical and economic power as a country increases along with our tax base.
I think you miss my point a little. As positions get filled by H1B it depletes the demand for that job .If I were going to college and deciding which field to get an education and I saw a huge demand I could rightly expect employment at a later date. But if all the jobs get filled then I would change my major .Then like construction the pipeline of skilled workers in that field dries up .This is why I say H1B needs to managed correctly. Anecdotally an engineer friend of mine had a difficult time getting a new job and felt it was partly his wage demands due to his experience. He might have been wrong but if there were no H1B he probably gets hired and paid the higher wage.
You are pointing out that to some extent and some circumstances a foreign born worker is a partial substitute for a native born worker. How much if any additional real income generation should society give up to prevent the income effect on the native born worker?
I guess you are assuming some financial burden or lack of productivity from hiring Americans? This is a slippery slope that could lead to your job eventually I think. I believe we owe it to our own countrymen to make a job opportunity available if they are willing and able. And only then should we farm out those jobs to others. I am not anti immigration but just pointing out some of the downsides and reasons to expect disruption from those that feel they are bearing the burden .
No, I’m just saying that I think immigrants are more compliments of domestic workers that substitutes. There is a net gain, but yes people with the skills most similar to the immigrant can suffer.
It's actually rare,for highly technical jobs, that one would hire an H1B rather than a native worker, if one was available. A few organizations do it to suppress wages and we should mandate residency for H1B's to avoid this. But even the best foreign English language speakers are not as good as natives and the H1B process is difficult. In my experience (as a 33 year engineer and sometimes hiring manager) we always hire the best person we can get. I think that the overall benefit to corporate and national economic performance far, far outweighs the shared salary costs to workers (from having more workers available).
Additional real income is practically useless if not distributed to the right people. It should only be assessed in terms of its effect on the native born worker and the native born customers (that is, the extent to which it accrues to profit or executive compensation is a waste, as are benefits to foreigners). But if it reduces prices to US customers on a purely 1:1 basis it should be considered.
The foreign born get no weight at all in you utility function?
But my view is that over a large range, the right immigrants, just like the right imports raise real income of the already immigrated (natives :)) Yes, with some losers among those with skills/characteristics most similar to the immigrant/imported good.
Foreign-born US citizens get weight, but not foreign citizens. I misspoke. America is supposed to work in Americans’ best interests though, particularly normal people
Problem is those losers can translate into a permanent under class of dependence on social services and a source of crime. People are not merely economic numbers.
This just is not correct. Highly technical positions require very specific fitting between employee and role. Companies hired too many ill-fitted people around Covid and are correcting. Every company that I have ever worked at, would always hire the "right person" for any of several roles, on a moments notice, no matter the economic condition. Generally(not that it is never abused), H1B is used to fulfill this need.
Why can’t these jobs be filled by people local? I don’t understand. I really want to know. And why should somebody go into a field where they are going to be competing with much lower paid foreign born workers? Doesn’t that kind of kill incentive to get educated and move into these fields?
It would seem to be an incentive to get educated to go into higher paying fields.
Probably collage entrance decisions should value paid employment over volunteer activities as an incentive for young people to learn about those lower rungs.
The demand for STEM graduates is high and unevenly distributed, and it takes 4 or more years to train a new employee, plus additional time for specialization. My wife has 14 years of secondary education (post high school) and I have 6. We've lived and worked in two countries and 4 different major metro areas in the USA. There are jobs we could fill elsewhere in the USA, but our relocation costs are prohibitively high. For a H1-B candidate, those costs are often lower and offset by the wage premium in the USA.
Regarding wages, one of the core tenants of H1-B is that the job pays the SAME wage as a non-H1-B hire. STEM companies are not in a position to undercut wages by hiring H1-B employees. These hires also incur additional legal cost in hiring. The sponsoring company must hire a lawyer to process the visa application.
You are naive. I am involved in this area a bit, and I can tell you, there are simple tricks to hiring and paying H1-B people far, far less than Americans would be paid, for the same work.
It is a huge financial incentive to not pay American workers. And that is a huge DISincentive to go to school and pursue these careers — because you have no chance against lower paid foreign H1-B workers
I am a software engineer and I learned in less than a year with no degree. This whole argument that years of education is necessary is nonsense. Education is an anachronistic societal ritual more than anything, and is used by employers as a convenient excuse for why they need to hire cheap foreigners. "We can't hire locally because it takes 4 years to train."
"Software engineer" is not a single job where all talent is fungible. There are many software engineering roles that require knowledge of core STEM education topics like discrete math, linear algebra, and calculus. And there are other roles that require expertise in a more specific domain like operating systems, networking, cryptography, etc.
I'll be the first to concede that four year degrees have some holdover cruft from nineteenth century liberal arts eduction (e.g you have to waste six credits pretending to learn French) and it would be good to remove this. And I'll further concede that it is possible that someone could become proficient at theoretical cs, calculus, and linear algebra without attending university. But this will be the exception, not the rule. At the end of the day, a degree is a good proxy for testing these skills. It would be prohibitively expensive to test each of these skills for every candidate, so the industry outsources accreditation.
No, they are not all exactly the same, and for some roles e.g. tech lead that really matters. But for an IC role the time needed to learn the new stuff and get up to speed is measured in months, not years. I know it because I've done it multiple times. Math is something you learn on demand for the use case, not something you need to just know. All of those laid off engineers could have been repurposed by now into any role filled by an H1-B (those with actual unique skills are on O1s), but that wouldn't fit the narrative of the companies that benefit from the continuous import of cheap foreign labor.
A software engineer with what company making how much per year? I've hired and fired a lot of software engineers over the years, including 1 year boot camp graduates. The successful boot camp engineers all have the following in common: prior work experience in a non-software field and a non-CS undergraduate degree.
Mid 300s. I won't say the company on a public forum. And, yes, I have both of those things, but it kind of makes my point for me. The number of Americans that have a non STEM bachelors and prior professional experience is in the 10s of millions. H1Bs are not needed for these jobs.
What you say is bad for the native carpenters, but exactly how does this work? The lowest entry-level skill-building is occupied by an immigrant and so the native never gets to invest in their own human capital?
But let's go with this being bad for the native who would become a carpenter. Is it bad for the rest of the economy. Isn't it better for the native would be carpenter to find a different activity?
I'm getting at, do you contend this a growth-distribution trade off? Or is this a value destruction?
Not sure how not being a carpenter would be better for the individual. You have to make a living some way and carpentry is a good job and America used to have a lot of them and it is a hard job to export. I think the whole immigration is good concept is based on jobs nobody wants to do or jobs with little future that might need a constant supply of young workers. As we go forward we are slowly displacing almost every job category with immigrants or computers .I deal with illegals all the time and I like and respect them but they do present a problem for those Americans whose skills or desires or abilities fit the same career path.
Or, like, in a crisis. I’m all for importing dirt cheap labor to build physical things because the cost of building infrastructure America needs is too high, I consider it a crisis. There’s no conceivable world where a shortage of SWEs (which we don’t have) would be a crisis, though.
Another aspect of the absurd “environmental” regulatory regime we have suffered under for 50 years is the monumental waste of capital and human talent that goes into all sides of the process — sponsors (government and private), opponents, lawyers, consultants doing the 1200-page studies, etc. Imagine if instead all that brainpower had been applied to something actually useful and productive.
Contrary to Noah, air travel is (mostly) not more expensive in Canada than in the US because of differences in regulation. Air travel in Canada is more market-based than the US in several respects.
Noah, if you have reason to think otherwise, please share your thoughts.
Keep in mind, you can fly across either country to major airports with an air portion of a fare around $100 if you're not choosy, which is miraculous to those of us who flew in the 1970s.
The most significant causes of flying in Canada being more expensive than the US, roughly in order, are:
1) Cabotage rules mean that Canada's market is independent, and historically too small to sustain more than 2 national players, decreasing airline competition. One can argue that cabotage is regulation, but the same rules apply to most of the world, including the US. Cabotage is akin to a lack of free trade in the sector.
2) Unlike the US, Canada doesn't heavily subsidize airports, they are revenue neutral or positive. In Canada, customers pay full freight for airports, navigation, security and immigration, where in the US cost recovery is only partial. On competitive routes, those costs frequently rival or exceed the air cost of flight.
3) Fuel is more expensive, airports are on average much further from fuel sources.
4) Lower population for the same size of territory, with a linear rather than planar distribution. US carrier route plans can exploit the planer distribution. In Canada overhead has to be spread over fewer passenger miles.
5) For a country like Canada, maintaining flights to distant smaller and remote communities is driven by national unity or security concerns, rather than economics. Regulations require one carrier (Air Canada) to provide flights to smaller and remote places which are uneconomic, but don't have other (economic) transport options. Cost recovery on those routes is not possible, and is recovered on the economic routes that don't have competitors or where competition isn't fierce.
For airfare in Canada to fall close to US levels, cabotage would have to end, and along with it, the major Canadian carriers. The federal Canadian government would have to subsidize airports, nav, etc to US levels, plus subsidize flights to smaller and remote communities. Much of the savings for users would simply shift to all taxpayers, and possibly even outrank the savings.
“Regarding personnel, hiring more government planners and managers, paying them in line with the private sector, and insourcing more planning could help.”
Really? Spend a season on any National Forest and you’ll think the opposite. The USFS is over-burdened with administrative staff and planners. Most of these people rarely go into the forests and perform any actual work on the ground. These are the ranks of “permanent, full-time, full-benefits” staff. Then there are “permanent seasonals,” employees who don’t work a full 12 months so the government doesn’t have to pay them as much, let alone provide full-time benefits and pensions. These represent the majority of USFS Ranger District “active” employees on the bottom rung of management. They get out in the forest to supervise seasonals who are on the 1360-hour temporary employment plan — most often college students with a few local residents. It’s these seasonals who perform the actual physical work. The most-active, full-time w/benefits and pensions are on USFS Fire, but these ranks are also populated with many seasonals.
Ironically, it was before the rise of NEPA that the USFS was most effective in re actual physical work in forests, and fire suppression was a top priority. NEPA is only part of the problem. A complete reform of the USFS bureaucracy is needed. More of the permanent, full-time USFS planners and administrators — cubicle foresters — need to spend time doing actual physical work in the forests. Here’s what is going to make matters even worse. The USFS has a huge budget problem. A stop to hiring of all temporary seasonals has been put in place for 2025, with no end in site. You can have all the models, management theories, planners, etc., but who’s going to do the actual physical work? Too many people live in the virtual world, and the physical world is slamming them into a reality they don’t wish to acknowledge. We need more actual foresters, not more “careerists” in the form of planners and managers.
But what do I know? I live one mile off a National Wilderness, where wildfires and climate-change record heat waves and extended droughts steadily kill the trees that wildfire have yet to consume. The high winds of climate change even blow down green, living trees every year.
You can bin NEPA. Then what? The USFS needs complete reform. In the meantime, AI and annual buildout of 40 data centers will string many more miles of electrical transmission cables over vast swaths of desiccated landscapes. Does a growth economy or economy if abundance solve our biggest problems of living in a physical world, on a planet? I don’t think so.
I think Noah has to do some historical research on the history of deregulation.
It is true that statutory deregulation occurred in the Carter Administration, largely through Ribicoff's Senate Committee on Government Operations and the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, but this did not spring like Venus out of the cock shell.
Well before that, the Antitrust Division under Nixon and Ford, under the leadership of Assistant Attorney General Kauper, did reports on the need for deregulation. In the House, the House and Senate Antitrust Committees jointly with the Justice Department, examined antitrust exemptions associated with regulation, and also promoted deregulation.
No, it wasn't Jimmy Carter alone.
The stage had been set earlier, the actors were in place, and the final act occurred during his term with his support, to be sure.
But, the play started earlier and involved more characters.
I’ve been reading you and a large groups of pundits talk about regulations.
I tend to agree with you guys. The trade offs of all the regulations and reducing it. But like what protects the environment if we gut nepa? Like across the board this kind of discussion seems under baked.
I can't say I'm surprised about Millenials' opinion on democracy. We've twice watched a POTUS be elected who lost the popular vote, an attempted coup by one of those POTUS', and then their re-election by plurality when the institutions meant to prevent them from still being a threat utterly failed at their role. Why would you believe in something that fails regularly?
"More state capacity, in the form of bureaucrats who are able to suss out this kind of opportunistic anti-development misinformation, is the obvious solution to this problem."
The burden of proof that the costs plaintiffs allege are greater than the benefits of the development should be appropriately high. A lot of the "capacity" shuold be in the system not heroic bureaucrats.
Hey, Noah, on the topic of gredflation there is a common argument bandied around by progressives that various recordings of CEOs on the topic of price increases proces the gredflation narratives. What merit does this actually have? Comments online seem to suggest it carries a lot of weight .
Acemoglu's argument may not be correct but I don't think that it's necessarily self-contradictory. I took him to be saying: 1) if the theory that technology industries grow in response to the supply of skilled labour is correct, then a new batch of skilled immigrant workers will stimulate tech industry growth. 2) that the recent influx of skilled workers should test this theory; and 3) that if it does prove to be true, then it would be even better if the US upskilled the existing workforce to stimulate tech industry growth rather than relying on immigrant labour to do it.
As for the empirical aspects of the argument, the idea that businesses locate in areas which are optimum in terms of the costs and benefits of one location relative to others and that one of the advantages in play is the availability of suitably skilled workers - this doesn't seem obviously wrong. Though of course it may not be proven yet and might be wrong.
A greater weakness with the argument may be the assumption that home-grown, skilled labour is as cost-effective (in terms of training and pay) and responsive to demand as immigrant skilled labour. For example, does it cost the US as much to train immigrant workers (in English language or civics) who already have the skills as it does to upskill existing workers? When they are trained are existing workers as productive as immigrant workers? What is the time lag to train existing workers vs. importing workers who already have the skills? And if there is a significant time lag does it impact on business location decisions? Will the opportunity that entrepreneurs / businesses are responding to have passed by the time the new cohort of skilled existing workers become available whereas immigrant workers are already on tap? Again, I don't know the answers to these questions, but from the narrow, short-medium term perspective of businesses making decisions, there must be some perceived advantage to immigrant workers or the US wouldn't be hoovering them up in such numbers and businesses wouldn't be so keen on maintaining the flow of them.
The medium-long term, wider consequences of high immigration for social cohesion and political stability, are another matter entirely. Maybe this is a debate which ultimately can't be settled on economic grounds alone. Acemoglu seems to be taking sides in this wider argument on the basis of political commitment rather than treating it as a point that can be argued out in economic terms. Which seems correct to me.
As Thomas Hutcheson says in several places, the key reason why NEPA came into existence was the externalities (and sometimes very bad ones) were NOT being considered. So, private companies made money and others (often not politically connected) paid the cost... Think burning rivers for example, Flint water, "cancer alley", etc.
NOW, the hard problem is how to include externalities - as Noah and others pointed out, NEPA has been weaponized by various actors - not always with the intent of avoiding a serious externality. And how to actually size up the externality is hard - what is the value of avoided cancer in population, etc.?
SO, one solution has always been regulation instead - simply don't let actors do things that raise the externality cost too high. That tends to not be very efficient from an economical sense, but IF the cost of determining how serious the externality is too high, then sometimes more efficient.
OK, which leaves the real issue - if NEPA has been overkill (and note that we don't read about all the places where NEPA has properly and successfully stopped utter crap - happened with a crazy local mine in my community....).... SO, then how do you take into account the externalities? IF you don't you get bad solutions for a lot of people and profits for a few - BUT if you made the process too crazy, then you get the problems Noah talked about.
I don't know the answer, but it is a harder problem than a lot of people seem to think it is.
Regulation of environmental economics is at the bottom just an extension of tort law. Someone thinks that someone else is harming them and they sue to get a judge to make the other person stop or reduce the harm and maybe pay damages for past harm. Why not make EPA the same thing, a specialized "court" to deal with alleged environmental harms at lower cost that regular courts. In a sense this is shifting the burden of proof from the initiator of the possible harm to show that there is none, to the persons affected by the harm as is the case with tort law.
I feel like I’ve read 100 articles about the horrors of NEPA and none of them ever call for just repealing it. Anyone know why?
I think many people on the Center Left are terrified of being perceived as “not caring about the environment.” I agree that repealing seems to be the best option. It is not clear that NEPA actually helps the natural environment very much.
The best counter-argument is that repeal would require Congressional legislation, which would be very difficult to achieve. Reforming it would likely only require Presidential action because it is the federal bureaucracy that transformed NEPA into Frankenstein’s monster. At the very least, the President could exempt certain projects from NEPA requirements, while a more substantial reform is being worked on.
To be clear, I am not saying that Noah Smith believes something different than he writes. What I am talking about is why they all seem to be afraid to take their complaints about NEPA to its logical consequence: repeal.
Thanks - that makes sense to me as an explanation for why it hasn’t been repealed, but not why these articles don’t call for it to be repealed, or at least mention that as a possible, if politically difficult goal.
Why haven’t Noah smith, Matt y, Ezra Klein, etc. written an article calling for repeal and explaining how it might happen? All these folks (Ezra maybe a bit less) are happy to take on “environmentalist” and groups causes.
I don’t think they’re scared! Which is why it seems likely that I’m missing something by thinking repeal would be worth exploring.
No we WANT externalities to be considered. It is inefficient to build a powerline where it causes more ecological damage than it is worth. We just need external costs to be properly estimated so they can be rationally balanced against benefits to produce the greatest NPV.
There is no evidence that NEPA comes anywhere near accurate to measuring external costs. The review process itself imposes external costs that do not need to be there.
The government is very bad at rationally balancing costs and benefits. And they spend a lot of money and time delivering no results.
Where do we disagree? Only on my insistence that there is a role that EPA should play, however bad you think they are on average?
What is the NPV for basking in the sun and watching wildlife in a state park?
Not sure, but for budgetary purposes, I'd say finance it with taxes, not borrowing. Now I could see some park investments having NPV > 0, things done now that avoid costs later on.
Yes, they are scared. Entire careers in the intelligentsia are based on status within the group.
They know that calling for an abolition of NEPA violates group norms within Left-of-Center college-educated professionals.
Whoever is the first high-profile person on the Left who advocates for the abolition of NEPA will likely be attacked by the entire group. It potentially ruins their career by ruining their social status within the group.
Unfortunately, it is this way for dozens of issues.
At some point, attitudes will shift (hopefully), but it is dangerous to be the first one who sticks their neck out to tell the entire group that they are wrong.
Unfortunately, that is how group-think mentalities work. And politics and ideology are where group-think mentalities are most prevalent.
This is how any large group works. Amazon or any big company it is near impossible to change the direction of the boat, it takes time, money, etc etc.
Nothing evil going on, just large scale organization challenges.
I never said that there is anything evil going on. Yes, you are correct that this is how all organizations work, but remember that we are not talking about one specific organization. All of the writers mentioned are in different organizations or are independent actors.
I think “group-think mentality” that is inherent to ideology better explains the psychology rather than how organizations work.
There is this tendency to try to lump them as "other" and I think it is important to recognize this is how groups we are all in operate. It takes a lot of work to change direction. No need to demonize; you said, "Entire careers in the intelligentsia are based on status within the group."
These are just people trying to pay for preschool, trying to do good work, trying to help everyone. Same as the dude repairing your car, same as the grocery store clerk, etc. This isn't some weird group of people off in the corner scheming, they are you.
Then why didn’t Biden exempt, say, rail projects from it like a sane person?
Because he did not want to. It would probably upset far more people within the Democratic coalition than it would please, so why bother?
And, yes, I agree that it should be done for rail projects, as well as energy, transportation, housing projects.
He was too busy securing his Mt. Rushmore legacy.
Likely because of momentum of these organizations and the amount of grift they generate. Also, statements like this don't help:
"Although I think most of those regulations are good overall,"
Step 1: pass a bill that renames NEPA to the "Stop Murdering Clowns Who Kill Children Act"
Step 2: repeal it, and claim victory in stopping the war on children.
There you go, fixed the optics of it. Politics 101.
Of course. Some actions by individuals impose costs on others in situations in whihc the imposer has no incentive to optimize his benefit with the cost to the other party. Negative externalities exist and ordinary tort law is inadequate to deal with some of them. It makes total economic sense, is efficient, growth promoting for a public body to force the source of the negative externality to take account of the harm done. The trick is to correctly measure the harm and create the lowest cost incentive to "internalize" the externality and to do so at low administrative cost
I'm not aware of anyone who has figured out that trick at scale in this context. Do you have any examples you were thinking of?
My guess is that most of EPA's work that does not make news is close enough. Maybe the best example is the regional SO2 pact.
But the question was about NEPA, not EPA. Is there some connection between the two that I'm not aware of?
Maybe I'm wrong but I've been assuming that NEPA is just one thing the EPA does. You are correct I did not address NEPA as a specific set of provisions. I don't know enough about it.
I was making the general point that consideration of externalities of an action (building a transmission line, for example) is proper, it contributes to increasing the total NPV of the action. It is the WAY "NEPA" forces that consideration that's the problem. I mistakenly interpreted "repeal NEPA" as meaning why not eliminate consideration of externalities.
Yeah, seems Noah is missing the obvious solution on this one:
> More state capacity, in the form of bureaucrats who are able to suss out this kind of opportunistic anti-development misinformation, is the obvious solution to this problem.
No, seriously, more bureaucrats to solve the red tape problem is actually the opposite of the most obvious solution here.
“The first challenge is personnel: government pay has not kept up with private pay, and the public workforce has not kept up with the workload; public-sector work is instead increasingly privatized, raising costs.’
I’m a living example of this. I retired after 29 years came back as a consultant (because they were hamstrung by the legislature to hire permanent replacement positions), and I’m making 50% more than when I left. And if you’re wondering why I stayed 29 years at crap wages, I really liked my job and it came with a secure pension, like no other private engineering firm offered.
The same holds true with USFS Fire. In semi-retirement from the private sector, I worked six seasons for the USFS, for wages barely above the poverty line. I could afford to because I didn’t need the money. Now that I no longer work seasonally for the USFS, it will pay me twice as much for wildfire work. As with many things, the privatizing of formerly government work simply adds greater cost to essential/necessary work. This trend began under Saint Reagan. It doesn’t surprise me his name adorns the Washington, DC International Airport; it’s a Reaganomics temple.
""I really liked my job and it came with a secure pension"
Maybe those wages weren't such crap, after all, if you consider the deferred wages you will be paid for life.
Maybe. But then most firms match 401k money similar to the way employee & State make equal contributions to the pension system here in WI and both have health plans. Although state plans are typically cheaper for the employee the benefits were mostly a wash. And of course there are no bonuses.
At the risk of being the NIMBY of the group, which I'm most certainly generally not, I must push back on the Snail Darter thing. I grew up and was living in the Tennessee Valley at the time and remember the process of seeing the Little T being lost. The Little T for those who don't know was a beautiful river flowing from the Smokey Mountains into the Tennessee River. It was reportedly one of the best trout streams in the U.S. It was also the last flowing, not damed river in the Tennessee River system. Recall that these dams were built for a combination of power production and flood control. At that point, in addition to all the other dams, the TVA had built nuclear reactors at Watts Bar, Sequoyah, and Brown's Ferry. The Tellico Dam (the at the time proposed dam of the Little T) would contribute a pittance to the overall power capacity. For flooding it was a total red herring since the much larger Fort Loudon and Watts Bar dams could contain far more capacity than the Tellico was going to. Despite that, the TVA wanted to do the project. Why? Because it was in the original plan and nobody was going to stop them. A useless dam that was a net negative got built.
I'll admit the Snail Darter, irrespective of its status as a species, was a dumb reason to stop a dam, but almost everybody in the Tennessee Valley region around the Little T was against this project going forward and the Snail Darter was the only legal leg we had to stand on. The reality is that if it had been delayed for 10 or so more years, it wouldn't have been built.
I should add that, despite the way it sounds, I'm not anti-TVA - just this project. The TVA probably did more than anything to help East Tennessee (loyal to the Union in the civil war, but suffered along with the rest of the Confederacy after) recover from it's long poverty. One can see the results if you look at the difference between the devastation of western North Carolina and East Tennessee due to Hurricane Helene. The both received similar rainfall, but the dams in TN (which had been rejected in NC) saved the day.
Yeah, but even you admit that the snail darter was a bullshit reason to stop the dam. You gave plenty of better reasons!
There should be some way, and possibly a requirement, to independently assess various projects midstream. Like I’m for the interstate highway system, but it was ridiculous that they ever wanted to build I-40 through Overton Park in Memphis, too.
I plead guilty. Truthfully, everybody but a few deluded enviro types knew it was a bullshit reason, but it was the only tool in the toolbox that was working at the time.
Similar stories to yours in my adopted hometowns of NYC and Boston. The infamous Robert Moses plan to build I-5 and route it through NYC's Greenwich Village and Boston's plan to build the Southwest Expressway through the South End. These are two of the most iconic city neighborhoods in the US that would have been destroyed by those plans.
But, all these examples illustrate the tension between preservation and progress that makes the N/YIMBY debate so difficult to navigate.
My experience with immigration in the construction business is that low cost workers displace and then replace native skilled construction workers. At this point it is difficult to find native carpenters ,plumbers and roofers as there is no career path for them to learn and prosper. When I was 18 back in the 70s construction jobs were plentiful and there were few illegals or none from what I recall .The H1B process could end with the same results in high tech if it is not managed correctly.
I am a STEM professional who is involved in hiring decisions, including H1-B candidates. I am also married to a STEM professional who has hired a foreign born/H1-B worker, so I feel very familiar with this topic.
You concerns about undocumented workers taking over STEM fields is unfounded. By and large H1-B employees are specialized and require higher levels of education. They are technology workers, doctors, bench scientists, and that, by definition of the H1-B visa, fill roles that cannot be filled by a suitable local candidate. Generally speaking, these are long term and permanent full-time roles.
These roles have very little in common with the skilled trades, such as carpenters, roofers, etc. Yes, I agree that f
...continued.
Yes, I agree that it can be harder to find native born tradesman. It seems that fewer teenagers choose vocational education or find meaningful summer work in the skilled trades. That said, I don't hear any complaints from the skilled tradesman I associate with, one of whom is my step brother, who works in residential construction. If anything, they're more upset that their skilled foreign born tradesman, who may not be documented, are under threat of deportation in a very tight labor market.
Well I am not against the illegals but at the same time there is a price to be paid and it is what my post was about. So yes they can be hard workers and are hard to replace but also they can displace legal citizens and disrupt the job/training supply chain leaving us with no options. Should be competitive wages to attract Americans and if there is still a shortage then bring in immigrant labor. That is not how things are working currently.
Correct, there's neither adequate wages, adequate training, adequate labor supply, or a mechanism for bringing in skilled labor from elsewhere via a visa program. These things have been known for years. Readers of this newsletter should be familiar with why. What policy changes do you think are necessary to address these problems?
So for the construction industry this problem of replacement has taken 30 years or more to get where it is today. If we pulled out all illegals tomorrow the industry would collapse .This is why I say the high tech H1B system needs to be done with care. I do not have the answer as to how specifically but I do think letting the industry police itself would be a mistake. They will flood the system with the cheapest labor they can get and 20 years from now some career paths will not be realistic for Americans. This leads to resentment and political upheaval.
If you make it mandatory for residency to become available quickly, then the H1B cannot be used to decrease wages (they can always switch jobs if they are underpaid). Once they are residents with top 5% income, they are likely to become citizens as well. Our overall technical and economic power as a country increases along with our tax base.
I think you miss my point a little. As positions get filled by H1B it depletes the demand for that job .If I were going to college and deciding which field to get an education and I saw a huge demand I could rightly expect employment at a later date. But if all the jobs get filled then I would change my major .Then like construction the pipeline of skilled workers in that field dries up .This is why I say H1B needs to managed correctly. Anecdotally an engineer friend of mine had a difficult time getting a new job and felt it was partly his wage demands due to his experience. He might have been wrong but if there were no H1B he probably gets hired and paid the higher wage.
You are pointing out that to some extent and some circumstances a foreign born worker is a partial substitute for a native born worker. How much if any additional real income generation should society give up to prevent the income effect on the native born worker?
I guess you are assuming some financial burden or lack of productivity from hiring Americans? This is a slippery slope that could lead to your job eventually I think. I believe we owe it to our own countrymen to make a job opportunity available if they are willing and able. And only then should we farm out those jobs to others. I am not anti immigration but just pointing out some of the downsides and reasons to expect disruption from those that feel they are bearing the burden .
No, I’m just saying that I think immigrants are more compliments of domestic workers that substitutes. There is a net gain, but yes people with the skills most similar to the immigrant can suffer.
It's actually rare,for highly technical jobs, that one would hire an H1B rather than a native worker, if one was available. A few organizations do it to suppress wages and we should mandate residency for H1B's to avoid this. But even the best foreign English language speakers are not as good as natives and the H1B process is difficult. In my experience (as a 33 year engineer and sometimes hiring manager) we always hire the best person we can get. I think that the overall benefit to corporate and national economic performance far, far outweighs the shared salary costs to workers (from having more workers available).
Additional real income is practically useless if not distributed to the right people. It should only be assessed in terms of its effect on the native born worker and the native born customers (that is, the extent to which it accrues to profit or executive compensation is a waste, as are benefits to foreigners). But if it reduces prices to US customers on a purely 1:1 basis it should be considered.
The foreign born get no weight at all in you utility function?
But my view is that over a large range, the right immigrants, just like the right imports raise real income of the already immigrated (natives :)) Yes, with some losers among those with skills/characteristics most similar to the immigrant/imported good.
Foreign-born US citizens get weight, but not foreign citizens. I misspoke. America is supposed to work in Americans’ best interests though, particularly normal people
Problem is those losers can translate into a permanent under class of dependence on social services and a source of crime. People are not merely economic numbers.
This is complete nonsense. The tech industry has had massive layoffs and there are not any open roles which can't be filled by US citizens.
This just is not correct. Highly technical positions require very specific fitting between employee and role. Companies hired too many ill-fitted people around Covid and are correcting. Every company that I have ever worked at, would always hire the "right person" for any of several roles, on a moments notice, no matter the economic condition. Generally(not that it is never abused), H1B is used to fulfill this need.
Why can’t these jobs be filled by people local? I don’t understand. I really want to know. And why should somebody go into a field where they are going to be competing with much lower paid foreign born workers? Doesn’t that kind of kill incentive to get educated and move into these fields?
It would seem to be an incentive to get educated to go into higher paying fields.
Probably collage entrance decisions should value paid employment over volunteer activities as an incentive for young people to learn about those lower rungs.
The demand for STEM graduates is high and unevenly distributed, and it takes 4 or more years to train a new employee, plus additional time for specialization. My wife has 14 years of secondary education (post high school) and I have 6. We've lived and worked in two countries and 4 different major metro areas in the USA. There are jobs we could fill elsewhere in the USA, but our relocation costs are prohibitively high. For a H1-B candidate, those costs are often lower and offset by the wage premium in the USA.
Regarding wages, one of the core tenants of H1-B is that the job pays the SAME wage as a non-H1-B hire. STEM companies are not in a position to undercut wages by hiring H1-B employees. These hires also incur additional legal cost in hiring. The sponsoring company must hire a lawyer to process the visa application.
You are naive. I am involved in this area a bit, and I can tell you, there are simple tricks to hiring and paying H1-B people far, far less than Americans would be paid, for the same work.
It is a huge financial incentive to not pay American workers. And that is a huge DISincentive to go to school and pursue these careers — because you have no chance against lower paid foreign H1-B workers
I am a software engineer and I learned in less than a year with no degree. This whole argument that years of education is necessary is nonsense. Education is an anachronistic societal ritual more than anything, and is used by employers as a convenient excuse for why they need to hire cheap foreigners. "We can't hire locally because it takes 4 years to train."
"Software engineer" is not a single job where all talent is fungible. There are many software engineering roles that require knowledge of core STEM education topics like discrete math, linear algebra, and calculus. And there are other roles that require expertise in a more specific domain like operating systems, networking, cryptography, etc.
I'll be the first to concede that four year degrees have some holdover cruft from nineteenth century liberal arts eduction (e.g you have to waste six credits pretending to learn French) and it would be good to remove this. And I'll further concede that it is possible that someone could become proficient at theoretical cs, calculus, and linear algebra without attending university. But this will be the exception, not the rule. At the end of the day, a degree is a good proxy for testing these skills. It would be prohibitively expensive to test each of these skills for every candidate, so the industry outsources accreditation.
No, they are not all exactly the same, and for some roles e.g. tech lead that really matters. But for an IC role the time needed to learn the new stuff and get up to speed is measured in months, not years. I know it because I've done it multiple times. Math is something you learn on demand for the use case, not something you need to just know. All of those laid off engineers could have been repurposed by now into any role filled by an H1-B (those with actual unique skills are on O1s), but that wouldn't fit the narrative of the companies that benefit from the continuous import of cheap foreign labor.
A software engineer with what company making how much per year? I've hired and fired a lot of software engineers over the years, including 1 year boot camp graduates. The successful boot camp engineers all have the following in common: prior work experience in a non-software field and a non-CS undergraduate degree.
Mid 300s. I won't say the company on a public forum. And, yes, I have both of those things, but it kind of makes my point for me. The number of Americans that have a non STEM bachelors and prior professional experience is in the 10s of millions. H1Bs are not needed for these jobs.
What you say is bad for the native carpenters, but exactly how does this work? The lowest entry-level skill-building is occupied by an immigrant and so the native never gets to invest in their own human capital?
But let's go with this being bad for the native who would become a carpenter. Is it bad for the rest of the economy. Isn't it better for the native would be carpenter to find a different activity?
I'm getting at, do you contend this a growth-distribution trade off? Or is this a value destruction?
Not sure how not being a carpenter would be better for the individual. You have to make a living some way and carpentry is a good job and America used to have a lot of them and it is a hard job to export. I think the whole immigration is good concept is based on jobs nobody wants to do or jobs with little future that might need a constant supply of young workers. As we go forward we are slowly displacing almost every job category with immigrants or computers .I deal with illegals all the time and I like and respect them but they do present a problem for those Americans whose skills or desires or abilities fit the same career path.
Or, like, in a crisis. I’m all for importing dirt cheap labor to build physical things because the cost of building infrastructure America needs is too high, I consider it a crisis. There’s no conceivable world where a shortage of SWEs (which we don’t have) would be a crisis, though.
Another aspect of the absurd “environmental” regulatory regime we have suffered under for 50 years is the monumental waste of capital and human talent that goes into all sides of the process — sponsors (government and private), opponents, lawyers, consultants doing the 1200-page studies, etc. Imagine if instead all that brainpower had been applied to something actually useful and productive.
Contrary to Noah, air travel is (mostly) not more expensive in Canada than in the US because of differences in regulation. Air travel in Canada is more market-based than the US in several respects.
Noah, if you have reason to think otherwise, please share your thoughts.
Keep in mind, you can fly across either country to major airports with an air portion of a fare around $100 if you're not choosy, which is miraculous to those of us who flew in the 1970s.
The most significant causes of flying in Canada being more expensive than the US, roughly in order, are:
1) Cabotage rules mean that Canada's market is independent, and historically too small to sustain more than 2 national players, decreasing airline competition. One can argue that cabotage is regulation, but the same rules apply to most of the world, including the US. Cabotage is akin to a lack of free trade in the sector.
2) Unlike the US, Canada doesn't heavily subsidize airports, they are revenue neutral or positive. In Canada, customers pay full freight for airports, navigation, security and immigration, where in the US cost recovery is only partial. On competitive routes, those costs frequently rival or exceed the air cost of flight.
3) Fuel is more expensive, airports are on average much further from fuel sources.
4) Lower population for the same size of territory, with a linear rather than planar distribution. US carrier route plans can exploit the planer distribution. In Canada overhead has to be spread over fewer passenger miles.
5) For a country like Canada, maintaining flights to distant smaller and remote communities is driven by national unity or security concerns, rather than economics. Regulations require one carrier (Air Canada) to provide flights to smaller and remote places which are uneconomic, but don't have other (economic) transport options. Cost recovery on those routes is not possible, and is recovered on the economic routes that don't have competitors or where competition isn't fierce.
For airfare in Canada to fall close to US levels, cabotage would have to end, and along with it, the major Canadian carriers. The federal Canadian government would have to subsidize airports, nav, etc to US levels, plus subsidize flights to smaller and remote communities. Much of the savings for users would simply shift to all taxpayers, and possibly even outrank the savings.
“Regarding personnel, hiring more government planners and managers, paying them in line with the private sector, and insourcing more planning could help.”
Really? Spend a season on any National Forest and you’ll think the opposite. The USFS is over-burdened with administrative staff and planners. Most of these people rarely go into the forests and perform any actual work on the ground. These are the ranks of “permanent, full-time, full-benefits” staff. Then there are “permanent seasonals,” employees who don’t work a full 12 months so the government doesn’t have to pay them as much, let alone provide full-time benefits and pensions. These represent the majority of USFS Ranger District “active” employees on the bottom rung of management. They get out in the forest to supervise seasonals who are on the 1360-hour temporary employment plan — most often college students with a few local residents. It’s these seasonals who perform the actual physical work. The most-active, full-time w/benefits and pensions are on USFS Fire, but these ranks are also populated with many seasonals.
Ironically, it was before the rise of NEPA that the USFS was most effective in re actual physical work in forests, and fire suppression was a top priority. NEPA is only part of the problem. A complete reform of the USFS bureaucracy is needed. More of the permanent, full-time USFS planners and administrators — cubicle foresters — need to spend time doing actual physical work in the forests. Here’s what is going to make matters even worse. The USFS has a huge budget problem. A stop to hiring of all temporary seasonals has been put in place for 2025, with no end in site. You can have all the models, management theories, planners, etc., but who’s going to do the actual physical work? Too many people live in the virtual world, and the physical world is slamming them into a reality they don’t wish to acknowledge. We need more actual foresters, not more “careerists” in the form of planners and managers.
But what do I know? I live one mile off a National Wilderness, where wildfires and climate-change record heat waves and extended droughts steadily kill the trees that wildfire have yet to consume. The high winds of climate change even blow down green, living trees every year.
You can bin NEPA. Then what? The USFS needs complete reform. In the meantime, AI and annual buildout of 40 data centers will string many more miles of electrical transmission cables over vast swaths of desiccated landscapes. Does a growth economy or economy if abundance solve our biggest problems of living in a physical world, on a planet? I don’t think so.
I think Noah has to do some historical research on the history of deregulation.
It is true that statutory deregulation occurred in the Carter Administration, largely through Ribicoff's Senate Committee on Government Operations and the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, but this did not spring like Venus out of the cock shell.
Well before that, the Antitrust Division under Nixon and Ford, under the leadership of Assistant Attorney General Kauper, did reports on the need for deregulation. In the House, the House and Senate Antitrust Committees jointly with the Justice Department, examined antitrust exemptions associated with regulation, and also promoted deregulation.
No, it wasn't Jimmy Carter alone.
The stage had been set earlier, the actors were in place, and the final act occurred during his term with his support, to be sure.
But, the play started earlier and involved more characters.
I’ve been reading you and a large groups of pundits talk about regulations.
I tend to agree with you guys. The trade offs of all the regulations and reducing it. But like what protects the environment if we gut nepa? Like across the board this kind of discussion seems under baked.
I can't say I'm surprised about Millenials' opinion on democracy. We've twice watched a POTUS be elected who lost the popular vote, an attempted coup by one of those POTUS', and then their re-election by plurality when the institutions meant to prevent them from still being a threat utterly failed at their role. Why would you believe in something that fails regularly?
"More state capacity, in the form of bureaucrats who are able to suss out this kind of opportunistic anti-development misinformation, is the obvious solution to this problem."
The burden of proof that the costs plaintiffs allege are greater than the benefits of the development should be appropriately high. A lot of the "capacity" shuold be in the system not heroic bureaucrats.
Hey, Noah, on the topic of gredflation there is a common argument bandied around by progressives that various recordings of CEOs on the topic of price increases proces the gredflation narratives. What merit does this actually have? Comments online seem to suggest it carries a lot of weight .
Weight to prove what?
Acemoglu's argument may not be correct but I don't think that it's necessarily self-contradictory. I took him to be saying: 1) if the theory that technology industries grow in response to the supply of skilled labour is correct, then a new batch of skilled immigrant workers will stimulate tech industry growth. 2) that the recent influx of skilled workers should test this theory; and 3) that if it does prove to be true, then it would be even better if the US upskilled the existing workforce to stimulate tech industry growth rather than relying on immigrant labour to do it.
As for the empirical aspects of the argument, the idea that businesses locate in areas which are optimum in terms of the costs and benefits of one location relative to others and that one of the advantages in play is the availability of suitably skilled workers - this doesn't seem obviously wrong. Though of course it may not be proven yet and might be wrong.
A greater weakness with the argument may be the assumption that home-grown, skilled labour is as cost-effective (in terms of training and pay) and responsive to demand as immigrant skilled labour. For example, does it cost the US as much to train immigrant workers (in English language or civics) who already have the skills as it does to upskill existing workers? When they are trained are existing workers as productive as immigrant workers? What is the time lag to train existing workers vs. importing workers who already have the skills? And if there is a significant time lag does it impact on business location decisions? Will the opportunity that entrepreneurs / businesses are responding to have passed by the time the new cohort of skilled existing workers become available whereas immigrant workers are already on tap? Again, I don't know the answers to these questions, but from the narrow, short-medium term perspective of businesses making decisions, there must be some perceived advantage to immigrant workers or the US wouldn't be hoovering them up in such numbers and businesses wouldn't be so keen on maintaining the flow of them.
The medium-long term, wider consequences of high immigration for social cohesion and political stability, are another matter entirely. Maybe this is a debate which ultimately can't be settled on economic grounds alone. Acemoglu seems to be taking sides in this wider argument on the basis of political commitment rather than treating it as a point that can be argued out in economic terms. Which seems correct to me.
As Thomas Hutcheson says in several places, the key reason why NEPA came into existence was the externalities (and sometimes very bad ones) were NOT being considered. So, private companies made money and others (often not politically connected) paid the cost... Think burning rivers for example, Flint water, "cancer alley", etc.
NOW, the hard problem is how to include externalities - as Noah and others pointed out, NEPA has been weaponized by various actors - not always with the intent of avoiding a serious externality. And how to actually size up the externality is hard - what is the value of avoided cancer in population, etc.?
SO, one solution has always been regulation instead - simply don't let actors do things that raise the externality cost too high. That tends to not be very efficient from an economical sense, but IF the cost of determining how serious the externality is too high, then sometimes more efficient.
OK, which leaves the real issue - if NEPA has been overkill (and note that we don't read about all the places where NEPA has properly and successfully stopped utter crap - happened with a crazy local mine in my community....).... SO, then how do you take into account the externalities? IF you don't you get bad solutions for a lot of people and profits for a few - BUT if you made the process too crazy, then you get the problems Noah talked about.
I don't know the answer, but it is a harder problem than a lot of people seem to think it is.
6. A bad viral chart about faith in democracy.
“There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics.”
— Mark Twain
Regulation of environmental economics is at the bottom just an extension of tort law. Someone thinks that someone else is harming them and they sue to get a judge to make the other person stop or reduce the harm and maybe pay damages for past harm. Why not make EPA the same thing, a specialized "court" to deal with alleged environmental harms at lower cost that regular courts. In a sense this is shifting the burden of proof from the initiator of the possible harm to show that there is none, to the persons affected by the harm as is the case with tort law.