This is the first time I’ve read someone articulate the “stasis subsidy” argument. It’s a particular framework for thinking about these issues that hadn’t occurred to me, I must confess. But it’s an insightful and elegant way to analyze the US right now. Noah, this is an incredibly powerful article. Thanks. (Would make an interesting book.)
i read this https://byrnehobart.medium.com/the-30-year-mortgage-is-an-intrinsically-toxic-product-200c901746a a couple of years ago and return to it periodically. seems plausible that nimbyism and nimby-enabling legislation is downstream of the ubiquity of fixed-rate 30-year mortgages, which (cyclically) lock the majority of the majority's assets into a highly illiquid, highly levered long position on a 3-block radius — or else (cyclically) unlock everyone all at once.
I read something in contract theory[1] is that people are agreeing to a kind of "social contract" with society writ large and they often make big, expensive, hard to undo decisions quite early in their life based on their understanding of that contract. Deciding what careers to pursue, where to take out a mortgage to buy a house, whether your wife should stop working, whether you need to save for college or just a high school education is enough for your kids, how many children to have, and so on.
But at certain times in history societies relatively suddenly include more stakeholders who, understandably, what some amount of revision of the social contract. But that revision might (probably?) will result in undermining some of the decisions previously made by others. It's a complex system and it isn't like people are good at forecasting how things will turn out in complex systems.
As a common example: people who built up lives in all those middle American factory towns where you could get a job out of high school paying $22/hour at a Ford supplier or whatever. You buy a house, have kids, your wife stays home and raises them. You buy snowmobiles, take holidays. Then the world shifts, the factory shuts down, your wife has to get a job after being out of the workforce for 15 years, holidays are off the table, etc.
Obviously this doesn't mean we should never renegotiate the social contract but this framing -- of making expensive irreversible decisions based on the prevailing social contract when you are 20-something and then being upset when that social contract changes -- made me more sympathetic to the stasis crowd.
[1]: It was either in Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World by Ryan Muldoon or The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society by Gerald Gaus, I don't remember which
In large part I'm 1000 percent "sympathetic" to the stasis crowd. If you live in a tranquil neighborhood, you might very reasonably prefer having 100 households within a quarter mile radius of your back yard than 400 households. I don't blame people for preferring the highest quality of life they can get.
I oppose NIMBYism and the various, other manifestations of the stasis subsidy simply because they cause a lot of problems, and on net, such policies don't (even begin) to pass any kind of utilitarian justification if we're indeed talking about the greater good.
That is to say, while I'm sympathetic, I wouldn't hesitate to take away the subsidy in question if I could.
This often isn't about "tranquility". It can be about building things that can't be built without destroying or damaging neighboring properties. I left a post about that. There seems to be no accountability if a developer builds in an area that can't handle the hardscape. See my post about what happened to my home.
Well yes, there's a finite supply of virgin land. Quite obviously, sometimes when you build new things you're replacing old things. And sometimes that's preferred, because undeveloped land is a precious resource.
So your "solution" would be to use eminent domain to force me out of the home which I bought and paid for and worked hard for to build equity?
You have no clue as to what you are unleashing. Given the massive corruption in our system right now, People in lower income groups will be displaced enmasse in favor of MORE luxury piss-poor construction that no one with an average income could ever afford?
In the corrupt and extreme economy like the US has right now, that is dead certain to create permanent state of destitution of the masses and push yet more money resources and control to the very top.
I will not sign on to that type of dystopia.
And btw, it isn't smart or ecologically valid to do massive building on wetlands. Which is exactly what builders have been doing.
>>So your "solution" would be to use eminent domain to force me out of the home which I bought and paid for and worked hard for to build equity?<<
I have no idea whether your house is situated in an area where we need to install wind turbines or a bullet train. All countries have eminent domain policies for the obvious reason that sometimes important stuff needs to get built. Full stop. It would suck to be forced out of one's home (at minimum we need to have fair compensatory policies). But you know what else sucks? Badly eroded competitiveness driven by an inability to build things. In the main, though, I don't think "insufficient eminent domain takings" are America's main problem in this area. What we mostly need is permitting and legal reform, at least when it comes to infrastructure.
With respect to housing, my view is that eminent domain almost need never play a role. To build more housing we mostly have to: A) establish a non-arbitrary, rules-based system for issuing building permits; and, B) restore property rights. If you've got ten acres and want to put up 500 units in an expensive metro area for humans who need places to live, you ought to be able to do so absent very rare and extenuating circumstances.
(I specified "metro" because I'm open to the idea that, sufficiently far from city centers—call it 50 miles—there may be a justification for policies explicitly designed to preserve wilderness, farmland and open space; but squaring the circle in this regard if anything probably means we need to encourage more *density* in order to make more economical use of land.)
Maybe $22 an hour in today's money, but paychecks in those jobs were nothing to brag about. You could buy a house that, today, nobody would want (my parents had one, now considered slum property although it was OK at the time) and a car that ran for four years before it needed major repairs. One car, so my father could get to work. Our standard of living in 1975 was much worse than most people remember. There was one big advantage - college was very cheap. But most people did not go to college at that time.
My comment was specifically about Janesville, WI, which had its factory idled in December 2008, not 1975. Curious that you assumed it was something that only happened half a century ago
My paternal and maternal families established themselves in the Janesville and Edgerton environs 1856 through 1890. In addition to the Janesville GMC plant closing in 2008, look at the regional impact of the Nunn Bush shoe factory closing long before 2008. My dad worked in the “shoe factory” post his 1933 Edgerton HS graduation in order to save up enough to attend UW Madison, which he did, graduating there in Dec 1942.
Also, from 1917 through to 1972, Highway Trailer provided good jobs to Janesvillians and Edgertonians living around and about its manufacturing plants.
Why is it important that we compete with China? Like what is the end goal of doing that. The purpose of building things should be to increase the quality of life for Americans, not just "compete with China".
We want to retain our dominance in key tech sectors like AI, biotech, etc. or else we would lose a hot war with them should that happen. So far we are ahead in these sectors, but the inability to build simple infrastructure and housing (along with other accumulated inefficiencies) paints a gloomy picture for our future growth in these fields
Right, usually a hypothetical war is given as the reason to compete with China and as such, the argument for working on our infrastructure is basically for defending the country or going to war.
My point is that this is a bad reason to upgrade infrastructure because people don't want to go to war.
Our infrastructure fails us every single day and should be improved, maintained, and built to increase our quality of life not to get us ready for a hypothetical attack.
Rather than thinking of it as a "hypothetical attack", you should think of it as all around fragility. Any reason to be less fragile, whether that comes from a hot war attack, cold war attack, natural disaster, famine, insurrection, climate disaster, supply chain shock, or any number of other possible national maladies, is the point. A robust, competent, and resilient people and infrastructure is the end game. It is important both for national defense and national prosperity.
Your quality of life is increased when your tail risk is hedged.
A common problem when a country is economically uncompetitive is people from wealthier countries come buy properties and businesses pricing the locals out and pushing them to the margins.
Hmm, I need to look at some data for that. Canada possesses one of the most powerful countries in the world, and yet a city like Vancouver has a real estate problem due to Chinese money. I agree that it is an issue, but governance might play a bigger role in that than economic dominance. Sure, China's economy is much greater than Canada's, but I would reason that Canada's economic success make it's real estate more desirable than a relatively less well-off country.
Regardless, I agree that foreigners purchasing on real estate can be a problem.
I've visited the USA 3 or 4 times over the years and the condition of essential infrastructure is, in places, very poor and in urgent need of replacing.
For once, Noah, I agree with you 100%. And I have a quote for you: "From December 1941 to September 1945 is 4 years. In those 4 years, we defeated Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Today it takes 17 years to add a 5th runway to the Atlanta airport. We are simply not prepared to be a serious country anymore."
Those words were spoken more than 15 years ago by Newt Gingrich, in a speech in Atlanta. I found the quote so unbelievable that I checked it. It's fairly accurate: the first Environmental Assessment is from the early 90's; constructions started in 2002; the runway opened in 2006. Whether it's 12 years or 17... it's way too long to build a necessary and basic public transportation amenity.
I served on the local Planning Commission for Elk Grove, CA (pop approx 150K) from 2006-2014. I can attest that you and Gingrich are correct: we are no longer prepared to be serious about building anything. Boilerplate "environmental impact" statements utterly devoid of useful content but costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce will kill a tree each time they're printed. I used to think this was just being extra-careful, then I saw how the sausage was made. Now I think they're basically make-work for environmentalists who can't get a real job. They're not the only ones though. Union leaders use CEQA (CA's Clean Air / Water Act) to delay any non-union project in environmental litigation for years. It's not about the environment; it's extortion. The moment the developer signs a union-scale, project labor agreement, the lawsuits vanish. The NIMBYism (from both Left and Right) is small potatoes compared to this sort of thing.
God help us if we had to actually tool up for a war. Can't you see it already: "sorry, we can't build battleships because the construction might hurt the endangered sea turtles". I like sea turtles and spotted owls and CA condors too, but at some point, the needs of people factor into the equation. Right now, they pretty much don't.
BTW: Don't tell any of your more lefty friends that you agree with Gingrich about something. They might vote you off the island.
I found another great example this morning. Between 1889 and 1900, we built the Chicago Drainage Canal which reversed the direction of the Chicago River, thus eliminating the cholera epidemics caused by the river carrying sewage into Lake Michigan.
Today there is a lot of (perhaps justified) environmental criticism for this. But it's still a great illustration of how far we're fallen. It takes longer to add a 5th runway to the Atlanta airport today than it did to dig a 28 mile canal with mostly ditch diggers (people, not machines.)
«I like sea turtles and spotted owls and CA condors too, but at some point, the needs of people factor into the equation. Right now, they pretty much don't.»
Grover Norquist: «The growth of the investor class -- those 70 per cent of voters who own stock and are more opposed to taxes and regulations on business as a result -- is strengthening the conservative movement. [...] Now if you say we're going to smash the big corporations, 60-plus percent of voters say "That's my retirement you're messing with. I don't appreciate that". And the Democrats have spent 50 years explaining that Republicans will pollute the earth and kill baby seals to get market caps higher. And in 2002, voters said, “We're sorry about the seals and everything but we really got to get the stock market up.”»
«BTW: Don't tell any of your more lefty friends that you agree with Gingrich about something.»
Newt Gingrich:«For most Americans the speed limit is a benchmark of opportunity. This is not a light insight.
If you have a society where almost every middle class person routinely fudges the law, that’s telling us something. We have laws that matter – murder, rape, and we have laws that don’t matter.
The first thing that every good American says each morning is “What’s the angle?” “How can I get around it?” “What does my lawyer think?” “There must be a loophole!” [...] America is the most incentive-driven society on the planet.»
> Let’s be clear about what an mRNA vaccine physically is. It is an RNA sequence in a lipid nanoparticle. RNA is like DNA but different. “Lipid” means “fat” and “nano” means “small.” To make the vaccine, you cook a bunch of enzymes and reagents and stuff to make the RNA, then put it in a fancy mixer with some special-ass fat. Done.
> An official course of the Moderna vaccine is 200 micrograms. The last time I took 200 micrograms of anything it was on a little paper square with a picture of Felix the Cat. 60kg of a chemical we’ve known how to make for a year would have averted this whole shitshow. Your mother could benchpress enough RNA to save America from Covid.
> The problem is not that it takes a year to cook up a bathtub of RNA, which is basically just cell jism, and blend it with a half-ton of lard. It does take a year, though, to build a production line that produces an FDA-approved biological under Good Manufacturing Practices. It’s quite impressive to get this done and it wasn’t cheap neither.
> The reader will be utterly unsurprised to learn that good in this context means perfect. As the saying goes, the perfect is the enemy of Grandma.
> If 1940s America—or even 1970s America—had had some shortage of super-special surgical glass vials, or some such shit-tier excuse, they would have parked a bathtub of chilled cell-jism-lard in a reefer truck, picked up a couple of half-educated Air Force medics wielding filthy bulk jet injectors, and driven around town with a loudspeaker blaring icecream jingles. Grandma might have gotten hepatitis—but not pneumonia.
> When we diagnose the effort that from end to end will get us all vaccinated in 18 to 24 months, the problem is not in the work or the workers, but the rules and assumptions. “Warp speed” simply meant doing everything by the book, but as fast as possible. This made it, like, five times as fast as usual.
> While this is nice, a process improvement of any such magnitude is unlikely to be anywhere near the limit of diminishing returns. Rather, it indicates that something was seriously wrong with the efficiency of the original process.
> In a situation like this—why should “usual” even matter? Why should there be a book? 1940s America would have thrown away the book and solved this as a one-off, and so would your eight-year-old.
> What ‘20s America should have done was to find the equivalent of General Groves—someone who knew nothing about public health, and everything about getting shit done—and order him to win the war on SARS-CoV-2, with zero rules.
> For example, such an effort would have used good manufacturing practices—but not perfect ones. Since perfect is the official standard, and good but not perfect does not exist, it would have to be invented. That’s something else ‘40s America was good at.
I disagree about the endangered species. Species extinction cannot be undone. The biosphere is a complex interacting system that we depend on for our survival. Allowing any species extinction is pulling a random bolt out of a plane you're flying in. Do it enough times and the plane crashes, and you don't know which bolt will cause that.
Species die all the time. Vast majority of species that ever existed went extinct. Nature is not some well-balanced system of delicate dependencies that, when disturbed, creates a cascading failure which wrecks everything. It's the opposite - it's anti-fragile. Of course there are exceptions.
I was at a dinner with some family who live in western Massachusetts about a year ago. Two items for your consideration.
First, the region had recently voted down a natural gas pipeline proposed to run through the area. Shortly after, the local gas utility started denying all requests for additional connections to the distribution network. This was widely interpreted as corporate retribution instead of, you know, basically fucking Newtonian physics.
Second, the town was considering a repeal of some ordinance that gave property owners effective veto rights over what adjacent property owners did with their, you know, property. I said something to the effect of, "If you want to be sure their construction doesn't impact your quality of life, build further back from your property line," and they looked at me like I was Donald Trump's own asshole. True story.
And you know, these people are liberal as the day is long on the summer solstice, but you're a fool if you think conservatives don't pull the same. Make of that what you will. I personally think America had it coming.
I'm trying to figure out the galaxy brain take that's something along the lines of getting exclusionary zoning declared a hazardous environmental contamination and thus declaring obstructionist policies a valid target of Superfund remediation.... ;)
We had to move from a wonderful neighborhood that was completely destroyed as student housing for the university expanded in to our neighborhood. Most of the students were perfectly fine and sincerely welcomed. But a minority of students insisted on loud parties in their front yard until 4am. When such a party house moved in both just behind us and right next door we finally had to bail and run. Sure, we talked to these neighbors, and their landlords, and the police. Nobody did anything. So if you want to hear a real rant, just keep writing about that. :-)
Why don't we get the government to enforce laws about loud parties at night instead of laws (implicitly) banning all students because they *might* have loud parties?
It seems logical to allow a student housing hall or townhouse development reserved for student use to avoid the spillover. But it is not just students. The Air BnB party houses are also a pox on neighborhoods.
And the bane of people looking for affordable housing. My town has over 1,000 housing units devoted to Air BnB, and restaurants in town closing during the week because they can't find staff to work there, as staff can't find housing. Have grown to loathe Air BnB.
Sounds good to me. The obstacle seems to be that the police have a great many other things to do, which are reasonably defined as being more important.
To be fair to students and young people in general....
We moved from the urban neighborhood near the university out to the suburbs on the edge of town, inhabited by adult white collar professional types. Where upon we were immediately blasted with dog barking from every direction. That's improved substantially in recent years, but we're still only one bad neighbor away from sonic chaos.
Point being, the problem is less students than it is human beings in general.
You have an interesting theory. We should investigate it further with a scientific experiment. Let's try this...
I'll stand out in front of your house blasting a boom box for a couple of hours in the middle of the night a couple days a week. After a month of that we'll send you a survey to see how you wish to define this phenomena.
1) Tom is sensitive to noise.
2) People who impose that kind of racket on their neighbors are assholes.
Just go ahead and post your address and we'll get this study underway. Should be interesting!
So maybe don't live by other humans, then. Life is all about tradeoffs. Complaining about other people when you can do something to maximize your happiness seems weird to me.
Sounds like the university didn't expand student housing, but that students expanded into off-campus housing. It sounds to me like exactly what Noah is saying is a problem: The university unable or unwilling to increase student housing on its own campus.
I think this is an important point and not just specific to college towns. Most Americans just don't want to live somewhere like SF or NYC and will pull out all the stops to prevent their neighborhood from becoming that. That's not a normative judgment, it's just an observation.
The fact of the matter is, it's a cultural problem/incompatibility. If you're relying on police to enforce these kinds of problems you've already lost half the battle. Americans just can't seem to coexist in dense environments that are desirable to most people and it's a small fraction of people who cause all the antisocial behavior.
Think of it another way, if you swapped all the Japanese people in Japan for Americans, would you get the same society? Of course not, it'd probably be chaos. That's not to say that Americans could *never* learn to live in dense Asian/European cities but it'd require a massive shift in social expectations.
SF is hardly that dense, and I think suburb lovers would be very happy with most of it. Similarly, lots of people love LA and NYC, that's why they all live there.
(SF does have real problems but most people aren't familiar with them. Instead they only know about fake problems.)
Everybody can choose where to buy a house. Choosing to live in a neighbood where a college could expand into and then complaining about the inevitable seems. . . short-sighted?
Cultivating a long-term perspective is tough, but if you want to stay in a neighborhood for 50 years, you probably should try to imagine how it could change over those 50 years, especially if there is a university the next neighborhood over (and how realistic are you to expect a neighborhood to not change over half a century?)
Look little dude, the people I was complaining about were waking up other students at 4am too. So were the good students supposed to anticipate that there would be ass hole morons in their class and so not go to college? Again, like I already said, MOST of the students were FINE and were WELCOMED.
There must be a natural law to bureaucracy where the more people you have working in an organisation the harder and harder it becomes to get anything done. Everyone knows that the infrastructure is crumbling and you’d think the Ohio train disaster would wake up legislators and civil servants and yet, still nothing gets done.
In the analysis of subway costs in the US that Noah linked, they found that one of the biggest issues is that decisions were made by inexperienced politicians and political appointees instead of by career civil servants who have gained experiencing by working their way up the ranks. Those inexperienced political appointees then delegate everything to external contractors instead of to the civil servants because there’s some sort of innate fear to trusting people who work for the government. But in the rest of the world outside of the anglosphere, they get things done by trusting the government bureaucracy and developing things bottom-up because they make sense instead of top-down because a politician supported it.
Of course, sometimes a politician does have a place in defining a large country wide effort, but we first need to let educated and experienced civil servants actually do the correct jobs. Also we should send them over to Europe and East Asia to learn how the civil servants over there do it.
That’s really interesting. Here in England our civil service is very bloated and quite inefficient with so many checks and balances (which are good thing in a sense) that it becomes incredibly hard to do anything with speed. Our vaccine program was a notable exception and that was organised by a special Vaccine Taskforce’ - a very small team with just the one job. Has led to debate here whether we should copy start-up model and have lots of small teams moving dynamically on different projects. Alas, have seen little evidence of them putting into practice this idea since.
Yeah, the analysis I’ve seen points to the bureaucracy in the UK as also being bad, but as the rest of Europe generally being better. There’s something of an anglophone bias, where English-speaking civil servants only bother to learn from other English speaking countries, while civil servants in the rest of Europe tend to speak both English and their native language (and often more!) and thus will learn from a broader array of examples.
Essentially the point I’m trying to make is civil servants are probably really competent (as you say is the US) but it’s just the bureaucratic system that prevents them from being able to get anything done!
Mmm, there’s the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, that within an organization there are two groups- those dedicated to the goals of the organization, and those dedicated to the organization itself. The second group always gains and keeps control of the organization.
That disaster, as far as I've understood it from the news, was caused by the poor rail infrastructure. If it wasn't so hard to build then perhaps it would never have happened.
This is nonsense. Not only do you generally not need permission to maintain something, especially when that thing is a freight car, but American private rail companies are so chronically investment-averse that "NIMBYs" can only be a minor part of the cause.
I read that there were some hotbox detectors that didn't work as they should have (e.g. an infrastructure issue), but to be honest the particulars aren't really the point. We can disagree on whether the train derailment is a good example or not (it may not be - and I'm certainly not trying to take away any blame from the train company themselves), the point I was trying to make was simply that large organisations struggle to get things done effectively because of the bureaucratic systems needed to manage that many people.
I agree with this post but not every one of its points. E.g., "Meanwhile, across the USA, housing is just not getting built."
I'm not sure this is true, especially for the kind of housing all right-thinking YIMBYs care about: multi-unit construction, especially buildings with 5+ units. That's going up, a lot. Starts are at their highest point since the mid-1980s (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST5F). And when you look at what's in the pipeline -- multi-family units currently under construction -- that's at the highest point since the 1970s, when the huge Boomer generation was just starting to build households (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNDCON5MUSA).
What has only seen a very small increase is new starts of duplexes/triplexes/fourplexes (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNDCON24USA). For whatever reason, these have fallen out of fashion and are being eclipsed by construction of much larger apartment/condo buildings.
What we're seeing instead is a dramatic pullback on the number of starts of *single family homes* (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST1F). And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
My favorite post yet. The only way out is innovation in atoms, to bypass the regulatory framework and start anew. Self-flying personal cars will change the way we live. It has the potential to fix the transportation and housing problem by enabling short commutes and affordable living far away from the city centers. Unfortunately, we are a good 20 years away from personal flying cars because of battery tech. I wish we could improve upon the current situation, but I think opinions are too entrenched and won’t change without some sort of calamity.. but we can always innovate our way out of it!
This is an example of the tragedy of the anticommons.
From Wikipedia:
"The tragedy of the anticommons is a type of coordination breakdown, in which a commons does not emerge, even when general access to resources or infrastructure would be a social good. It is a mirror-image of the older concept of tragedy of the commons... The "tragedy of the anticommons" covers a range of coordination failures, including patent thickets and submarine patents. Overcoming these breakdowns can be difficult, but there are assorted means, including eminent domain, laches, patent pools, or other licensing organizations."
Essentially, the tragedy of the anticommons means there are too many rights holders and they cannot come to agreement. Much regulation, including zoning and environmental law, creates more rights holders.
The classic Chinese examples are the "nail houses".
Minor quibble: "2/3 of Americans who owns a home" is wrong: 2/3 of households are owner occupied. Any solution that removes net value to the owners will be vigorously opposed for simple pocketbook reasons. Which is why they fight so vigourously with and for zoning.
Boston's "Big Dig" project successfully solved such problems, but at an enormous cost: it was the most expensive highway project of its sort ever. It did so by settling with every stakeholder: no use of eminent domain.
A legislative solution might involve recognizing the values of the overlapping rights, pricing violations of those rights above those values, and allowing specific high-priority projects to simply pay for them (as eminent domain does) without entering the very slow tort system.
"Ikiru" is a brilliant Japanese film by Kurosawa that illustrates overcoming a number of such issues on a very small scale. I'm sure you've seen it, Noah. I don't usually like tearjerkers, but this one is great.
Isn't the "Big Dig" the one where the contractor skimped on the glue and took shortcuts in the construction and the ceiling collapsed and closed the tunnel and killed a lady? I forget how many others were injured but it's a famous civil engineering "Do Not Do" case study used in construction/engineering texts.
Breaking the backs of the NIMBYs and stomping them into the dust is needed if America is to remain competitive. The UK didn’t do that and now it gets to enter a not-so-genteel decline.
It’s not just physical stuff. Our schools healthcare system, criminal justice system, social services and even higher education systems are all well below par and an embarrassment compared to most countries. The US let’s face it is in a state of collapse, and I’m doubtful that this country has the unity or the will to give a damn enough to dig ourselves out of thishole. And as climate, extremes, worsen, our physical and social fabric will fray still further into a giant downward spiral
all but impossible to stabilize, much less reverse
We do have a workforce shortage as well. Honestly, I just don't see young people attracted to hard jobs in unwelcome environments. My husband is an electrician and we live in the NE and there at least 3 apprentices quit because they don't like working in the cold weather having to lift heavy things four days a week. These are union jobs providing healthcare, pension, annuity and now offer sick time d/t state law. I remember my husband had to actually dig the ditches they laid pipe in when he was starting out and these kids have large construction machinery doing it. Kids are soft today. Thing is, those computers don't run without someone outside making sure that the power is hooked up. You know who are doing lots of these the hard and boring jobs now are the migrant child labor who have already demonstrated having to do hard things in unwelcome environments (according to the NYT yesterday) but our 20-somethings demand a controlled indoor environment. Now, water mains freeze and stop working/flood and someone has to go out in the blizzard and drill the road surface to get to it and fix it... It shouldn't have to be some 17 year old kid from Guatemala who has to be at high school in the morning.
The irony being that professions (or 'trades' , she said with a sniff) like plumbing, carpentry, and electrician can't be outsourced, and you can realistically aspire to being your own boss and not a widget sitting in a company cubicle.
These are also the type of jobs least likely to be replaced by AI. But as Cheerio said, it's grueling, physically taxing, and arguably not very safe work.
Yes but working for hours standing on an extension ladder or crouched in a crawl space, dealing with the dust/dirt of a worksite, the chemicals sprayed on steel (flame retardant) and all kinds of other issues such as it being very hot or very cold and no water available or no bathrooms (port o Johns that are not climate controlled -incidentally,- construction workers, even in industrial and commercial areas, even office buildings are not allowed to use the indoor plumbing... Hauling extremely heavy circuit boxes, pipe, reels of wire etc-- many of these guys are underconditioned strength-wise. My husband is often the one doing that heavy work (and he's in his 50's, an age that when he was a young man, they took care of). He goes to the gym 4 days a week to keep his strength. --
But due to his time on the job, even before he started actually because he would look up how to do things - (they used to sell How-To guides, we liked the ones "for dummies")- he always fixed his own cars until they made them so you can't..., changed his own oil, fixed his own brakes, handled the plumbing in the house if there was a problem (has repaired our garbage disposal countless times), handled anything needing carpentry, - put in all our hardwood floors, did drywall, redid all our tile in the bathroom, walls and floor, fixed the shower plumbing, put in new sinks and toilets, replaced the outside spigots, rewired our basement, put in overhead lights in the upstairs, used to fix the pool filter every year when it was gummed up with tree needles until I insisted we get rid of the pool and he then took it apart...
One of the posters pointed out that old building stock often needs updating and repair -- and contractors are hard to find. Yes, all homes need maintenance and repair, even when they seem just fine. You figure out how to do it... get a parent to come over or a neighbor that has done it once or twice or just do a YouTube Binge. I even learned how to grout and caulk the tub and have painted the interior of the entire house more than once. Not everyone hires contractors. The older homes were actually built better in that they have stood the test of time. They need insulation board and new siding and maybe a new roof and updated circuit-breaker box if using the old bulb fuses. Windows can be reglazed.
Thanks for the reality check Cheerio. You're right, it is demanding, always-on-call work. Still, I don't regret my decision to trade a corporate job with one doing landscape design and grubbing in the dirt, even though way less lucrative.
Growing stuff is cool and a basic skill. I mean, quarterly reports are not very nutritious, don't produce oxygen, and are also not great in the compost bin. Plus conference rooms/meetings are soul killing.
Well, you have a point in that hard, boring work is.. well, hard and boring. Not all of it is boring though. My husband belongs to a trade union and they train all their Journeyman through an apprenticeship program. They have pride of craftsmanship and a lot of responsibility. They keep the civilization going. When there are power outages from Hurricanes, who is it that comes besides the Red Cross? It is the linemen from other states to restore essential services because without the electricity, the power, the food goes bad, the water treatment plants don't work, the oxygen machines and ventilators will stop (generators last for only so long.. and who sets them up and does maintenance on them?) the Factories stop, the computers won't work, the mail doesn't get delivered... okay, it will eventually but the postal service does not hand sort all the mail anymore, that's why it takes less than 8-12 weeks to get an order in the mail... What does 911 rely on? Entire companies would not be able to operate without the infrastructure provided by power/electricity. Also Covid would have nothing on Cholera if we did not have plumbers ensuring that all our sanitation systems were working properly. My husband's grandfather used to be the Master Plumber of the City of Yonkers and kept the boilers running. These are not jobs that are meaningless. Anyone can work a call center. But if the phones don't work, they starve.
My job is hard and boring with long hours on my feet. but I feel I have helped save a few lives and comforted some distress. Sometimes it is less boring than other times... but that is mostly because it is very stressful. What is the point of having intricate systems of trade if there is no one willing to load the cargo, operate the ship to get it to port and unload it?
We have to stop thinking about essential jobs as mostly being expendable or avoidable because if we do, the knowledge and skills will be forgotten and left to those we outsource them to (like foreign employment agencies) and we will be screwed. They will find out exactly how the rich taste.
Hard and boring work also builds character. I want my kids to be happy functional adults who achieve their dreams and goals. I don't want them to grow up to be soft self-centered selfish conceited lazy whiners who don't stop to consider how good they have it compared to so many other people in this world, which is what would happen if you try to protect your kids too much.
Yes, we used to have to work hard at jobs like snow shoveling, yard work and gardening, --manual labor stuff and don't think girls had it so easy... Spring Cleaning was a bear. I remember snow days were a great way to earn some extra money. Also when I was a kid, I lived close to the bay in LI an we would dig clams all day or go out and catch bait (little minnows) or dig worms after a rain for the bait shop. I also had a paper route. I never see kids doing anything like that today. Also, my parents would send us to clean the snow and ice off the steps for our elderly neighbors and help other neighbors with bringing in groceries as a courtesy.
Where in LI? I was born in Bayshore Hospital. We lived in Patchogue. We moved upstate to Syracuse. But I lived in Patchogue when I was in middle school with my Dad (after my parents split).
The US is more sclerotic than many places but "state of collapse"? Jeez. Go touch grass. And also go out in the world a little more. Visit places like Egypt and Nigeria. Many Americans don't realize how fortunate they are.
You don’t have to go to Nigeria to find some place worse off. If you get dropped randomly somewhere on earth, you’re likely to end up somewhere worse off than the US.
I thank you for making my point by pointing to the most elite of the elite hospitals and universities, that serve the 1%. Higher education is severely under funded and the US gets less for its healthcare dollar than any country in the world, in terms of overall mortality and health and wellness. And we had pretty much the worst outcomes from Covid of any country in the world, despite having supposedly the best public health system.
The reason why loans are being forgiven, is because of the massive amount of debt that students incur which did not happen in previous decades because public support for higher education was much more robust then. You acknowledge that the health of our citizens is terrible by listing all sorts of what you call cultural factors. What why is it then that all of our ‘cultural factors’ lead to much worse health outcomes, then in every other advanced country? Perhaps you should take your blinkers off and recognize how much pain and suffering there is in this country relative to its wealth. And how much America has declined relative to other advance countries in the past several decades. This country was number one or close the number one in virtually every public and private domain until the 1980s when Reaganomics destroyed the public sector and led to the explosion in equality and rapacious unchecked private equity
This is the first time I’ve read someone articulate the “stasis subsidy” argument. It’s a particular framework for thinking about these issues that hadn’t occurred to me, I must confess. But it’s an insightful and elegant way to analyze the US right now. Noah, this is an incredibly powerful article. Thanks. (Would make an interesting book.)
Thanks!!
i read this https://byrnehobart.medium.com/the-30-year-mortgage-is-an-intrinsically-toxic-product-200c901746a a couple of years ago and return to it periodically. seems plausible that nimbyism and nimby-enabling legislation is downstream of the ubiquity of fixed-rate 30-year mortgages, which (cyclically) lock the majority of the majority's assets into a highly illiquid, highly levered long position on a 3-block radius — or else (cyclically) unlock everyone all at once.
I read something in contract theory[1] is that people are agreeing to a kind of "social contract" with society writ large and they often make big, expensive, hard to undo decisions quite early in their life based on their understanding of that contract. Deciding what careers to pursue, where to take out a mortgage to buy a house, whether your wife should stop working, whether you need to save for college or just a high school education is enough for your kids, how many children to have, and so on.
But at certain times in history societies relatively suddenly include more stakeholders who, understandably, what some amount of revision of the social contract. But that revision might (probably?) will result in undermining some of the decisions previously made by others. It's a complex system and it isn't like people are good at forecasting how things will turn out in complex systems.
As a common example: people who built up lives in all those middle American factory towns where you could get a job out of high school paying $22/hour at a Ford supplier or whatever. You buy a house, have kids, your wife stays home and raises them. You buy snowmobiles, take holidays. Then the world shifts, the factory shuts down, your wife has to get a job after being out of the workforce for 15 years, holidays are off the table, etc.
Obviously this doesn't mean we should never renegotiate the social contract but this framing -- of making expensive irreversible decisions based on the prevailing social contract when you are 20-something and then being upset when that social contract changes -- made me more sympathetic to the stasis crowd.
[1]: It was either in Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World by Ryan Muldoon or The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society by Gerald Gaus, I don't remember which
>>made me more sympathetic to the stasis crowd.<<
In large part I'm 1000 percent "sympathetic" to the stasis crowd. If you live in a tranquil neighborhood, you might very reasonably prefer having 100 households within a quarter mile radius of your back yard than 400 households. I don't blame people for preferring the highest quality of life they can get.
I oppose NIMBYism and the various, other manifestations of the stasis subsidy simply because they cause a lot of problems, and on net, such policies don't (even begin) to pass any kind of utilitarian justification if we're indeed talking about the greater good.
That is to say, while I'm sympathetic, I wouldn't hesitate to take away the subsidy in question if I could.
This often isn't about "tranquility". It can be about building things that can't be built without destroying or damaging neighboring properties. I left a post about that. There seems to be no accountability if a developer builds in an area that can't handle the hardscape. See my post about what happened to my home.
Well yes, there's a finite supply of virgin land. Quite obviously, sometimes when you build new things you're replacing old things. And sometimes that's preferred, because undeveloped land is a precious resource.
So your "solution" would be to use eminent domain to force me out of the home which I bought and paid for and worked hard for to build equity?
You have no clue as to what you are unleashing. Given the massive corruption in our system right now, People in lower income groups will be displaced enmasse in favor of MORE luxury piss-poor construction that no one with an average income could ever afford?
In the corrupt and extreme economy like the US has right now, that is dead certain to create permanent state of destitution of the masses and push yet more money resources and control to the very top.
I will not sign on to that type of dystopia.
And btw, it isn't smart or ecologically valid to do massive building on wetlands. Which is exactly what builders have been doing.
>>So your "solution" would be to use eminent domain to force me out of the home which I bought and paid for and worked hard for to build equity?<<
I have no idea whether your house is situated in an area where we need to install wind turbines or a bullet train. All countries have eminent domain policies for the obvious reason that sometimes important stuff needs to get built. Full stop. It would suck to be forced out of one's home (at minimum we need to have fair compensatory policies). But you know what else sucks? Badly eroded competitiveness driven by an inability to build things. In the main, though, I don't think "insufficient eminent domain takings" are America's main problem in this area. What we mostly need is permitting and legal reform, at least when it comes to infrastructure.
With respect to housing, my view is that eminent domain almost need never play a role. To build more housing we mostly have to: A) establish a non-arbitrary, rules-based system for issuing building permits; and, B) restore property rights. If you've got ten acres and want to put up 500 units in an expensive metro area for humans who need places to live, you ought to be able to do so absent very rare and extenuating circumstances.
(I specified "metro" because I'm open to the idea that, sufficiently far from city centers—call it 50 miles—there may be a justification for policies explicitly designed to preserve wilderness, farmland and open space; but squaring the circle in this regard if anything probably means we need to encourage more *density* in order to make more economical use of land.)
Deal, your property is your property and you have all the rights to it.
At the same time, please explain what right you have to have a say in what your neighbor is building on their own land?
Maybe $22 an hour in today's money, but paychecks in those jobs were nothing to brag about. You could buy a house that, today, nobody would want (my parents had one, now considered slum property although it was OK at the time) and a car that ran for four years before it needed major repairs. One car, so my father could get to work. Our standard of living in 1975 was much worse than most people remember. There was one big advantage - college was very cheap. But most people did not go to college at that time.
My comment was specifically about Janesville, WI, which had its factory idled in December 2008, not 1975. Curious that you assumed it was something that only happened half a century ago
My paternal and maternal families established themselves in the Janesville and Edgerton environs 1856 through 1890. In addition to the Janesville GMC plant closing in 2008, look at the regional impact of the Nunn Bush shoe factory closing long before 2008. My dad worked in the “shoe factory” post his 1933 Edgerton HS graduation in order to save up enough to attend UW Madison, which he did, graduating there in Dec 1942.
Builders and makers need to carry on:
https://www.wispolitics.com/2017/wisconsin-historical-society-the-nunn-bush-shoe-company-factory-in-milwaukee-listed-in-national-register-of-historic-places
Also, from 1917 through to 1972, Highway Trailer provided good jobs to Janesvillians and Edgertonians living around and about its manufacturing plants.
https://mycompanies.fandom.com/wiki/Highway_Trailer_Company
Sure. A lot of people lived like Ralph Kramden. We tend to view the past through sepia-colored spectacles.
Virginia Postrel did a great book on this 25 years ago.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_and_Its_Enemies
It’s the #1 thing holding back more economic growth and prosperity in the country.
It’s and insane unforced error.
The US will never compete with China with our short sightedness and inability to build.
It’s lunacy.
Defeating the NIMBYs and the NIMBY mindset will be one of the most important tasks of this generation.
Much much more support and amplification of this message is needed Noah (and friends).
Help!
I’ve written about this as well. It’s a tragic own goal. And it’s must change.
https://medium.com/@Greg_Costigan/nimbys-are-destroying-the-future-we-deserve-22b52bc05afe
Why is it important that we compete with China? Like what is the end goal of doing that. The purpose of building things should be to increase the quality of life for Americans, not just "compete with China".
We want to retain our dominance in key tech sectors like AI, biotech, etc. or else we would lose a hot war with them should that happen. So far we are ahead in these sectors, but the inability to build simple infrastructure and housing (along with other accumulated inefficiencies) paints a gloomy picture for our future growth in these fields
Right, usually a hypothetical war is given as the reason to compete with China and as such, the argument for working on our infrastructure is basically for defending the country or going to war.
My point is that this is a bad reason to upgrade infrastructure because people don't want to go to war.
Our infrastructure fails us every single day and should be improved, maintained, and built to increase our quality of life not to get us ready for a hypothetical attack.
Rather than thinking of it as a "hypothetical attack", you should think of it as all around fragility. Any reason to be less fragile, whether that comes from a hot war attack, cold war attack, natural disaster, famine, insurrection, climate disaster, supply chain shock, or any number of other possible national maladies, is the point. A robust, competent, and resilient people and infrastructure is the end game. It is important both for national defense and national prosperity.
Your quality of life is increased when your tail risk is hedged.
A common problem when a country is economically uncompetitive is people from wealthier countries come buy properties and businesses pricing the locals out and pushing them to the margins.
Hmm, I need to look at some data for that. Canada possesses one of the most powerful countries in the world, and yet a city like Vancouver has a real estate problem due to Chinese money. I agree that it is an issue, but governance might play a bigger role in that than economic dominance. Sure, China's economy is much greater than Canada's, but I would reason that Canada's economic success make it's real estate more desirable than a relatively less well-off country.
Regardless, I agree that foreigners purchasing on real estate can be a problem.
We and our allies are less likely to get attacked if we maintain military dominance.
It is not the #1 thing. It is just 1 of many.
A serious lack of ppl educated in a trade is just as much the issue.
I've visited the USA 3 or 4 times over the years and the condition of essential infrastructure is, in places, very poor and in urgent need of replacing.
The cost of “build nothing” also shows up in demographics. I know many people who would have more children if not for extreme housing costs.
For once, Noah, I agree with you 100%. And I have a quote for you: "From December 1941 to September 1945 is 4 years. In those 4 years, we defeated Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Today it takes 17 years to add a 5th runway to the Atlanta airport. We are simply not prepared to be a serious country anymore."
Those words were spoken more than 15 years ago by Newt Gingrich, in a speech in Atlanta. I found the quote so unbelievable that I checked it. It's fairly accurate: the first Environmental Assessment is from the early 90's; constructions started in 2002; the runway opened in 2006. Whether it's 12 years or 17... it's way too long to build a necessary and basic public transportation amenity.
I served on the local Planning Commission for Elk Grove, CA (pop approx 150K) from 2006-2014. I can attest that you and Gingrich are correct: we are no longer prepared to be serious about building anything. Boilerplate "environmental impact" statements utterly devoid of useful content but costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce will kill a tree each time they're printed. I used to think this was just being extra-careful, then I saw how the sausage was made. Now I think they're basically make-work for environmentalists who can't get a real job. They're not the only ones though. Union leaders use CEQA (CA's Clean Air / Water Act) to delay any non-union project in environmental litigation for years. It's not about the environment; it's extortion. The moment the developer signs a union-scale, project labor agreement, the lawsuits vanish. The NIMBYism (from both Left and Right) is small potatoes compared to this sort of thing.
God help us if we had to actually tool up for a war. Can't you see it already: "sorry, we can't build battleships because the construction might hurt the endangered sea turtles". I like sea turtles and spotted owls and CA condors too, but at some point, the needs of people factor into the equation. Right now, they pretty much don't.
BTW: Don't tell any of your more lefty friends that you agree with Gingrich about something. They might vote you off the island.
I found another great example this morning. Between 1889 and 1900, we built the Chicago Drainage Canal which reversed the direction of the Chicago River, thus eliminating the cholera epidemics caused by the river carrying sewage into Lake Michigan.
Today there is a lot of (perhaps justified) environmental criticism for this. But it's still a great illustration of how far we're fallen. It takes longer to add a 5th runway to the Atlanta airport today than it did to dig a 28 mile canal with mostly ditch diggers (people, not machines.)
«I like sea turtles and spotted owls and CA condors too, but at some point, the needs of people factor into the equation. Right now, they pretty much don't.»
http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0903/0903norquistinterview.htm
Grover Norquist: «The growth of the investor class -- those 70 per cent of voters who own stock and are more opposed to taxes and regulations on business as a result -- is strengthening the conservative movement. [...] Now if you say we're going to smash the big corporations, 60-plus percent of voters say "That's my retirement you're messing with. I don't appreciate that". And the Democrats have spent 50 years explaining that Republicans will pollute the earth and kill baby seals to get market caps higher. And in 2002, voters said, “We're sorry about the seals and everything but we really got to get the stock market up.”»
«BTW: Don't tell any of your more lefty friends that you agree with Gingrich about something.»
https://aspace-uwg.galileo.usg.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/124552
Newt Gingrich:«For most Americans the speed limit is a benchmark of opportunity. This is not a light insight.
If you have a society where almost every middle class person routinely fudges the law, that’s telling us something. We have laws that matter – murder, rape, and we have laws that don’t matter.
The first thing that every good American says each morning is “What’s the angle?” “How can I get around it?” “What does my lawyer think?” “There must be a loophole!” [...] America is the most incentive-driven society on the planet.»
It reminds me of Moldbug's take on covid vaccines (which were figured out in Jan 2020, yet weren't deployed until about a year later): https://graymirror.substack.com/p/2020-the-year-of-everything-fake
> Let’s be clear about what an mRNA vaccine physically is. It is an RNA sequence in a lipid nanoparticle. RNA is like DNA but different. “Lipid” means “fat” and “nano” means “small.” To make the vaccine, you cook a bunch of enzymes and reagents and stuff to make the RNA, then put it in a fancy mixer with some special-ass fat. Done.
> An official course of the Moderna vaccine is 200 micrograms. The last time I took 200 micrograms of anything it was on a little paper square with a picture of Felix the Cat. 60kg of a chemical we’ve known how to make for a year would have averted this whole shitshow. Your mother could benchpress enough RNA to save America from Covid.
> The problem is not that it takes a year to cook up a bathtub of RNA, which is basically just cell jism, and blend it with a half-ton of lard. It does take a year, though, to build a production line that produces an FDA-approved biological under Good Manufacturing Practices. It’s quite impressive to get this done and it wasn’t cheap neither.
> The reader will be utterly unsurprised to learn that good in this context means perfect. As the saying goes, the perfect is the enemy of Grandma.
> If 1940s America—or even 1970s America—had had some shortage of super-special surgical glass vials, or some such shit-tier excuse, they would have parked a bathtub of chilled cell-jism-lard in a reefer truck, picked up a couple of half-educated Air Force medics wielding filthy bulk jet injectors, and driven around town with a loudspeaker blaring icecream jingles. Grandma might have gotten hepatitis—but not pneumonia.
> When we diagnose the effort that from end to end will get us all vaccinated in 18 to 24 months, the problem is not in the work or the workers, but the rules and assumptions. “Warp speed” simply meant doing everything by the book, but as fast as possible. This made it, like, five times as fast as usual.
> While this is nice, a process improvement of any such magnitude is unlikely to be anywhere near the limit of diminishing returns. Rather, it indicates that something was seriously wrong with the efficiency of the original process.
> In a situation like this—why should “usual” even matter? Why should there be a book? 1940s America would have thrown away the book and solved this as a one-off, and so would your eight-year-old.
> What ‘20s America should have done was to find the equivalent of General Groves—someone who knew nothing about public health, and everything about getting shit done—and order him to win the war on SARS-CoV-2, with zero rules.
> For example, such an effort would have used good manufacturing practices—but not perfect ones. Since perfect is the official standard, and good but not perfect does not exist, it would have to be invented. That’s something else ‘40s America was good at.
I disagree about the endangered species. Species extinction cannot be undone. The biosphere is a complex interacting system that we depend on for our survival. Allowing any species extinction is pulling a random bolt out of a plane you're flying in. Do it enough times and the plane crashes, and you don't know which bolt will cause that.
Species die all the time. Vast majority of species that ever existed went extinct. Nature is not some well-balanced system of delicate dependencies that, when disturbed, creates a cascading failure which wrecks everything. It's the opposite - it's anti-fragile. Of course there are exceptions.
I was at a dinner with some family who live in western Massachusetts about a year ago. Two items for your consideration.
First, the region had recently voted down a natural gas pipeline proposed to run through the area. Shortly after, the local gas utility started denying all requests for additional connections to the distribution network. This was widely interpreted as corporate retribution instead of, you know, basically fucking Newtonian physics.
Second, the town was considering a repeal of some ordinance that gave property owners effective veto rights over what adjacent property owners did with their, you know, property. I said something to the effect of, "If you want to be sure their construction doesn't impact your quality of life, build further back from your property line," and they looked at me like I was Donald Trump's own asshole. True story.
And you know, these people are liberal as the day is long on the summer solstice, but you're a fool if you think conservatives don't pull the same. Make of that what you will. I personally think America had it coming.
I'm trying to figure out the galaxy brain take that's something along the lines of getting exclusionary zoning declared a hazardous environmental contamination and thus declaring obstructionist policies a valid target of Superfund remediation.... ;)
We had to move from a wonderful neighborhood that was completely destroyed as student housing for the university expanded in to our neighborhood. Most of the students were perfectly fine and sincerely welcomed. But a minority of students insisted on loud parties in their front yard until 4am. When such a party house moved in both just behind us and right next door we finally had to bail and run. Sure, we talked to these neighbors, and their landlords, and the police. Nobody did anything. So if you want to hear a real rant, just keep writing about that. :-)
Why don't we get the government to enforce laws about loud parties at night instead of laws (implicitly) banning all students because they *might* have loud parties?
It seems logical to allow a student housing hall or townhouse development reserved for student use to avoid the spillover. But it is not just students. The Air BnB party houses are also a pox on neighborhoods.
And the bane of people looking for affordable housing. My town has over 1,000 housing units devoted to Air BnB, and restaurants in town closing during the week because they can't find staff to work there, as staff can't find housing. Have grown to loathe Air BnB.
Sounds good to me. The obstacle seems to be that the police have a great many other things to do, which are reasonably defined as being more important.
To be fair to students and young people in general....
We moved from the urban neighborhood near the university out to the suburbs on the edge of town, inhabited by adult white collar professional types. Where upon we were immediately blasted with dog barking from every direction. That's improved substantially in recent years, but we're still only one bad neighbor away from sonic chaos.
Point being, the problem is less students than it is human beings in general.
Reading your posts it seems as though you need to move to a more rural area since you are sensitive to your neighbors noise
You have an interesting theory. We should investigate it further with a scientific experiment. Let's try this...
I'll stand out in front of your house blasting a boom box for a couple of hours in the middle of the night a couple days a week. After a month of that we'll send you a survey to see how you wish to define this phenomena.
1) Tom is sensitive to noise.
2) People who impose that kind of racket on their neighbors are assholes.
Just go ahead and post your address and we'll get this study underway. Should be interesting!
So maybe don't live by other humans, then. Life is all about tradeoffs. Complaining about other people when you can do something to maximize your happiness seems weird to me.
Sounds like the university didn't expand student housing, but that students expanded into off-campus housing. It sounds to me like exactly what Noah is saying is a problem: The university unable or unwilling to increase student housing on its own campus.
Sounds like another failure to build - an effective police force. That’s becoming all too common.
These failures to build interact with each other and the problem snowballs.
I think this is an important point and not just specific to college towns. Most Americans just don't want to live somewhere like SF or NYC and will pull out all the stops to prevent their neighborhood from becoming that. That's not a normative judgment, it's just an observation.
The fact of the matter is, it's a cultural problem/incompatibility. If you're relying on police to enforce these kinds of problems you've already lost half the battle. Americans just can't seem to coexist in dense environments that are desirable to most people and it's a small fraction of people who cause all the antisocial behavior.
Think of it another way, if you swapped all the Japanese people in Japan for Americans, would you get the same society? Of course not, it'd probably be chaos. That's not to say that Americans could *never* learn to live in dense Asian/European cities but it'd require a massive shift in social expectations.
SF is hardly that dense, and I think suburb lovers would be very happy with most of it. Similarly, lots of people love LA and NYC, that's why they all live there.
(SF does have real problems but most people aren't familiar with them. Instead they only know about fake problems.)
So maybe don't live in a college town.
Everybody can choose where to buy a house. Choosing to live in a neighbood where a college could expand into and then complaining about the inevitable seems. . . short-sighted?
We were in that neighborhood before the problem student's parents were born.
Were you there before the university was built?
Cultivating a long-term perspective is tough, but if you want to stay in a neighborhood for 50 years, you probably should try to imagine how it could change over those 50 years, especially if there is a university the next neighborhood over (and how realistic are you to expect a neighborhood to not change over half a century?)
Look little dude, the people I was complaining about were waking up other students at 4am too. So were the good students supposed to anticipate that there would be ass hole morons in their class and so not go to college? Again, like I already said, MOST of the students were FINE and were WELCOMED.
But here you are posting about them and you moved. So was it fine and welcomed or not?
There must be a natural law to bureaucracy where the more people you have working in an organisation the harder and harder it becomes to get anything done. Everyone knows that the infrastructure is crumbling and you’d think the Ohio train disaster would wake up legislators and civil servants and yet, still nothing gets done.
In the analysis of subway costs in the US that Noah linked, they found that one of the biggest issues is that decisions were made by inexperienced politicians and political appointees instead of by career civil servants who have gained experiencing by working their way up the ranks. Those inexperienced political appointees then delegate everything to external contractors instead of to the civil servants because there’s some sort of innate fear to trusting people who work for the government. But in the rest of the world outside of the anglosphere, they get things done by trusting the government bureaucracy and developing things bottom-up because they make sense instead of top-down because a politician supported it.
Of course, sometimes a politician does have a place in defining a large country wide effort, but we first need to let educated and experienced civil servants actually do the correct jobs. Also we should send them over to Europe and East Asia to learn how the civil servants over there do it.
That’s really interesting. Here in England our civil service is very bloated and quite inefficient with so many checks and balances (which are good thing in a sense) that it becomes incredibly hard to do anything with speed. Our vaccine program was a notable exception and that was organised by a special Vaccine Taskforce’ - a very small team with just the one job. Has led to debate here whether we should copy start-up model and have lots of small teams moving dynamically on different projects. Alas, have seen little evidence of them putting into practice this idea since.
Yeah, the analysis I’ve seen points to the bureaucracy in the UK as also being bad, but as the rest of Europe generally being better. There’s something of an anglophone bias, where English-speaking civil servants only bother to learn from other English speaking countries, while civil servants in the rest of Europe tend to speak both English and their native language (and often more!) and thus will learn from a broader array of examples.
Essentially the point I’m trying to make is civil servants are probably really competent (as you say is the US) but it’s just the bureaucratic system that prevents them from being able to get anything done!
Mmm, there’s the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, that within an organization there are two groups- those dedicated to the goals of the organization, and those dedicated to the organization itself. The second group always gains and keeps control of the organization.
Funnily enough I happened to read Freddie deBoer’s post (https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-yimby-movement-demonstrates-social) soon after making this comment and he quoted the Iron Law of Institutions and it feels so relevant.
The important thing to remember about that law is that it was written by a crank sci fi author boomer and doesn't necessarily have to be true.
I have no idea how your takeaway from the East Palestine derailment is "we need less bureaucracy".
That disaster, as far as I've understood it from the news, was caused by the poor rail infrastructure. If it wasn't so hard to build then perhaps it would never have happened.
This is nonsense. Not only do you generally not need permission to maintain something, especially when that thing is a freight car, but American private rail companies are so chronically investment-averse that "NIMBYs" can only be a minor part of the cause.
I read that there were some hotbox detectors that didn't work as they should have (e.g. an infrastructure issue), but to be honest the particulars aren't really the point. We can disagree on whether the train derailment is a good example or not (it may not be - and I'm certainly not trying to take away any blame from the train company themselves), the point I was trying to make was simply that large organisations struggle to get things done effectively because of the bureaucratic systems needed to manage that many people.
I agree with this post but not every one of its points. E.g., "Meanwhile, across the USA, housing is just not getting built."
I'm not sure this is true, especially for the kind of housing all right-thinking YIMBYs care about: multi-unit construction, especially buildings with 5+ units. That's going up, a lot. Starts are at their highest point since the mid-1980s (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST5F). And when you look at what's in the pipeline -- multi-family units currently under construction -- that's at the highest point since the 1970s, when the huge Boomer generation was just starting to build households (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNDCON5MUSA).
What has only seen a very small increase is new starts of duplexes/triplexes/fourplexes (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNDCON24USA). For whatever reason, these have fallen out of fashion and are being eclipsed by construction of much larger apartment/condo buildings.
What we're seeing instead is a dramatic pullback on the number of starts of *single family homes* (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST1F). And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
It's due to increased land costs and pent up housing demand. Builders make more $ on MF homes
For whatever reason, there's a lot more MF housing being built these days.
The kind of article I love most from Noah- unexpected topic, explanation why it matters and a cool name to visualize the problem
My favorite post yet. The only way out is innovation in atoms, to bypass the regulatory framework and start anew. Self-flying personal cars will change the way we live. It has the potential to fix the transportation and housing problem by enabling short commutes and affordable living far away from the city centers. Unfortunately, we are a good 20 years away from personal flying cars because of battery tech. I wish we could improve upon the current situation, but I think opinions are too entrenched and won’t change without some sort of calamity.. but we can always innovate our way out of it!
Excellent article! This is a very similar situation in Canada.
This is an example of the tragedy of the anticommons.
From Wikipedia:
"The tragedy of the anticommons is a type of coordination breakdown, in which a commons does not emerge, even when general access to resources or infrastructure would be a social good. It is a mirror-image of the older concept of tragedy of the commons... The "tragedy of the anticommons" covers a range of coordination failures, including patent thickets and submarine patents. Overcoming these breakdowns can be difficult, but there are assorted means, including eminent domain, laches, patent pools, or other licensing organizations."
Essentially, the tragedy of the anticommons means there are too many rights holders and they cannot come to agreement. Much regulation, including zoning and environmental law, creates more rights holders.
The classic Chinese examples are the "nail houses".
Minor quibble: "2/3 of Americans who owns a home" is wrong: 2/3 of households are owner occupied. Any solution that removes net value to the owners will be vigorously opposed for simple pocketbook reasons. Which is why they fight so vigourously with and for zoning.
Boston's "Big Dig" project successfully solved such problems, but at an enormous cost: it was the most expensive highway project of its sort ever. It did so by settling with every stakeholder: no use of eminent domain.
A legislative solution might involve recognizing the values of the overlapping rights, pricing violations of those rights above those values, and allowing specific high-priority projects to simply pay for them (as eminent domain does) without entering the very slow tort system.
"Ikiru" is a brilliant Japanese film by Kurosawa that illustrates overcoming a number of such issues on a very small scale. I'm sure you've seen it, Noah. I don't usually like tearjerkers, but this one is great.
Isn't the "Big Dig" the one where the contractor skimped on the glue and took shortcuts in the construction and the ceiling collapsed and closed the tunnel and killed a lady? I forget how many others were injured but it's a famous civil engineering "Do Not Do" case study used in construction/engineering texts.
Yes it is. However, on such an enormous project, it is not unusual for SOMETHING to be messed up. That was not characteristic of the project overall.
For that and other corruption by contractors, see the Wikipedia article for a brief synopsis.
Breaking the backs of the NIMBYs and stomping them into the dust is needed if America is to remain competitive. The UK didn’t do that and now it gets to enter a not-so-genteel decline.
great point
It’s not just physical stuff. Our schools healthcare system, criminal justice system, social services and even higher education systems are all well below par and an embarrassment compared to most countries. The US let’s face it is in a state of collapse, and I’m doubtful that this country has the unity or the will to give a damn enough to dig ourselves out of thishole. And as climate, extremes, worsen, our physical and social fabric will fray still further into a giant downward spiral
all but impossible to stabilize, much less reverse
We do have a workforce shortage as well. Honestly, I just don't see young people attracted to hard jobs in unwelcome environments. My husband is an electrician and we live in the NE and there at least 3 apprentices quit because they don't like working in the cold weather having to lift heavy things four days a week. These are union jobs providing healthcare, pension, annuity and now offer sick time d/t state law. I remember my husband had to actually dig the ditches they laid pipe in when he was starting out and these kids have large construction machinery doing it. Kids are soft today. Thing is, those computers don't run without someone outside making sure that the power is hooked up. You know who are doing lots of these the hard and boring jobs now are the migrant child labor who have already demonstrated having to do hard things in unwelcome environments (according to the NYT yesterday) but our 20-somethings demand a controlled indoor environment. Now, water mains freeze and stop working/flood and someone has to go out in the blizzard and drill the road surface to get to it and fix it... It shouldn't have to be some 17 year old kid from Guatemala who has to be at high school in the morning.
The irony being that professions (or 'trades' , she said with a sniff) like plumbing, carpentry, and electrician can't be outsourced, and you can realistically aspire to being your own boss and not a widget sitting in a company cubicle.
These are also the type of jobs least likely to be replaced by AI. But as Cheerio said, it's grueling, physically taxing, and arguably not very safe work.
Yes but working for hours standing on an extension ladder or crouched in a crawl space, dealing with the dust/dirt of a worksite, the chemicals sprayed on steel (flame retardant) and all kinds of other issues such as it being very hot or very cold and no water available or no bathrooms (port o Johns that are not climate controlled -incidentally,- construction workers, even in industrial and commercial areas, even office buildings are not allowed to use the indoor plumbing... Hauling extremely heavy circuit boxes, pipe, reels of wire etc-- many of these guys are underconditioned strength-wise. My husband is often the one doing that heavy work (and he's in his 50's, an age that when he was a young man, they took care of). He goes to the gym 4 days a week to keep his strength. --
But due to his time on the job, even before he started actually because he would look up how to do things - (they used to sell How-To guides, we liked the ones "for dummies")- he always fixed his own cars until they made them so you can't..., changed his own oil, fixed his own brakes, handled the plumbing in the house if there was a problem (has repaired our garbage disposal countless times), handled anything needing carpentry, - put in all our hardwood floors, did drywall, redid all our tile in the bathroom, walls and floor, fixed the shower plumbing, put in new sinks and toilets, replaced the outside spigots, rewired our basement, put in overhead lights in the upstairs, used to fix the pool filter every year when it was gummed up with tree needles until I insisted we get rid of the pool and he then took it apart...
One of the posters pointed out that old building stock often needs updating and repair -- and contractors are hard to find. Yes, all homes need maintenance and repair, even when they seem just fine. You figure out how to do it... get a parent to come over or a neighbor that has done it once or twice or just do a YouTube Binge. I even learned how to grout and caulk the tub and have painted the interior of the entire house more than once. Not everyone hires contractors. The older homes were actually built better in that they have stood the test of time. They need insulation board and new siding and maybe a new roof and updated circuit-breaker box if using the old bulb fuses. Windows can be reglazed.
Thanks for the reality check Cheerio. You're right, it is demanding, always-on-call work. Still, I don't regret my decision to trade a corporate job with one doing landscape design and grubbing in the dirt, even though way less lucrative.
Growing stuff is cool and a basic skill. I mean, quarterly reports are not very nutritious, don't produce oxygen, and are also not great in the compost bin. Plus conference rooms/meetings are soul killing.
Well, you have a point in that hard, boring work is.. well, hard and boring. Not all of it is boring though. My husband belongs to a trade union and they train all their Journeyman through an apprenticeship program. They have pride of craftsmanship and a lot of responsibility. They keep the civilization going. When there are power outages from Hurricanes, who is it that comes besides the Red Cross? It is the linemen from other states to restore essential services because without the electricity, the power, the food goes bad, the water treatment plants don't work, the oxygen machines and ventilators will stop (generators last for only so long.. and who sets them up and does maintenance on them?) the Factories stop, the computers won't work, the mail doesn't get delivered... okay, it will eventually but the postal service does not hand sort all the mail anymore, that's why it takes less than 8-12 weeks to get an order in the mail... What does 911 rely on? Entire companies would not be able to operate without the infrastructure provided by power/electricity. Also Covid would have nothing on Cholera if we did not have plumbers ensuring that all our sanitation systems were working properly. My husband's grandfather used to be the Master Plumber of the City of Yonkers and kept the boilers running. These are not jobs that are meaningless. Anyone can work a call center. But if the phones don't work, they starve.
My job is hard and boring with long hours on my feet. but I feel I have helped save a few lives and comforted some distress. Sometimes it is less boring than other times... but that is mostly because it is very stressful. What is the point of having intricate systems of trade if there is no one willing to load the cargo, operate the ship to get it to port and unload it?
We have to stop thinking about essential jobs as mostly being expendable or avoidable because if we do, the knowledge and skills will be forgotten and left to those we outsource them to (like foreign employment agencies) and we will be screwed. They will find out exactly how the rich taste.
Hard and boring work also builds character. I want my kids to be happy functional adults who achieve their dreams and goals. I don't want them to grow up to be soft self-centered selfish conceited lazy whiners who don't stop to consider how good they have it compared to so many other people in this world, which is what would happen if you try to protect your kids too much.
Yes, we used to have to work hard at jobs like snow shoveling, yard work and gardening, --manual labor stuff and don't think girls had it so easy... Spring Cleaning was a bear. I remember snow days were a great way to earn some extra money. Also when I was a kid, I lived close to the bay in LI an we would dig clams all day or go out and catch bait (little minnows) or dig worms after a rain for the bait shop. I also had a paper route. I never see kids doing anything like that today. Also, my parents would send us to clean the snow and ice off the steps for our elderly neighbors and help other neighbors with bringing in groceries as a courtesy.
Where in LI? I was born in Bayshore Hospital. We lived in Patchogue. We moved upstate to Syracuse. But I lived in Patchogue when I was in middle school with my Dad (after my parents split).
The US is more sclerotic than many places but "state of collapse"? Jeez. Go touch grass. And also go out in the world a little more. Visit places like Egypt and Nigeria. Many Americans don't realize how fortunate they are.
If one has to go to places like Nigeria to find someplace worse off than the US, then you’ve made my point much more effectively than even I did…,
As the leftists say: Check your privilege please.
You don’t have to go to Nigeria to find some place worse off. If you get dropped randomly somewhere on earth, you’re likely to end up somewhere worse off than the US.
I thank you for making my point by pointing to the most elite of the elite hospitals and universities, that serve the 1%. Higher education is severely under funded and the US gets less for its healthcare dollar than any country in the world, in terms of overall mortality and health and wellness. And we had pretty much the worst outcomes from Covid of any country in the world, despite having supposedly the best public health system.
The reason why loans are being forgiven, is because of the massive amount of debt that students incur which did not happen in previous decades because public support for higher education was much more robust then. You acknowledge that the health of our citizens is terrible by listing all sorts of what you call cultural factors. What why is it then that all of our ‘cultural factors’ lead to much worse health outcomes, then in every other advanced country? Perhaps you should take your blinkers off and recognize how much pain and suffering there is in this country relative to its wealth. And how much America has declined relative to other advance countries in the past several decades. This country was number one or close the number one in virtually every public and private domain until the 1980s when Reaganomics destroyed the public sector and led to the explosion in equality and rapacious unchecked private equity