Joel Kotkin, data hound; Razib Khan on Pastoral Nomads; Nathan Goodman on failure in the government market; Richard Hanania and Philippe Lemoine on Twitter; Barry Weingast on violence and politics;
On Joel Kotkin: I *hear* things like this, about people abandoning San Francisco and the Bay Area, and about people refusing to return to the office.
But then I live in the Bay Area and I *see* things like home prices going up 18% YoY and increasingly heavy traffic every morning to my office (as I go into “in-person” work!). I also hear my friends getting back into the swing of in-person meetings, travel, etc., and enjoying the re-socialization.
California obviously has issues. I wouldn’t tell my kids to move here after college. And I don’t deny there’s something going on that Kotkin is putting his finger on. But the facts on the ground do not completely support his narrative.
I don’t have a great counter-narrative. The best I can come up with is that Silicon Valley is becoming a sort of “c-suite” for companies, with the highest paying jobs at the most-profitable companies sitting here, with the lower paying jobs pushed to remote. I suspect people would cry foul at that characterization (i.e., those who’ve moved to Austin after going remote). I also suspect there will be a point in time when companies start applying their regional salary adjustments more vigorously. Those salary adjustments don’t just say “do the same job in different places, get different dollars”. They shape the type of jobs and responsibilities that occur in each place. The higher salaries confer higher status, irrespective of what goes out the other side in taxes and cost-of-living, and people want status. (Especially in Silicon Valley companies…)
Regardless, the next two or three years will be interesting, as we see the pandemic’s lasting effect on people’s lifestyles. It will be different than what came before, I’m sure. I also suspect it will be different than what anyone is quite able to perceive right now.
“But you could have done the same thing in the blogosphere”
I don’t think so. The thing about Twitter is if I reply to Mr Big Shot he feels compelled to reply back, particularly if my critique gets a lot of attention. The blogosphere might work like that too but the time it takes to compose a post and put it up makes it less likely. And if me and Mr Big Shot get into an argument in the blogosphere, it’s happening at a blog people might or might not visit, instead of in the town square. This makes it harder to let insults and critiques go unanswered. Plus I’m critiquing a lot more stuff on Twitter because of how low effort it is. Which sounds bad but I think there’s a lot of dumb stuff out there that deserves to be attacked and I wouldn’t have the time to write a blog post about everything. Twitter is instant gratification/psychological harm, so it pulls people in like nothing else.
"Plus I’m critiquing a lot more stuff on Twitter because of how low effort it is. Which sounds bad but I think there’s a lot of dumb stuff out there that deserves to be attacked and I wouldn’t have the time to write a blog post about everything."
I think maybe you need to consider carefully whether all the things that deserve to be attacked are actually worth your time to do so. A thousand critiques a nanometer thick are probably not worth anything, and certainly not worth more than 1/day with some meat on the bones.
School policy is generally set by independently elected school boards and not bundled into other local governments. Doesn't seem to do a lot of good in big cities. Are there any well-done studies about the size at which a polity generally stops being effective and almost always gets captured by the institutions it's supposed to control?
On your point about Barry Weingast’s post, that has long seemed to me to be a really good argument for moderate constitutional reform, including things like:
- fixing the number of Supreme Court justices, to eliminate court packing
- making Supreme Court appointment be for a period of 18 years, so presidents predictably get to appoint one every two years
- prohibiting a president from pardoning himself
- making some version of the 60-vote rule in the senate constitutional
- etc
The hard part is that almost no one is incentivized to be a moderate, and many would look on these as barriers to their agenda.
Many areas have multiple, overlapping, independent, quasi governmental districts. The school district in my town is separate from the municipal government, and from the community college district. The boundaries aren’t quite the same. The people a block north of me are in the same town, but in a separate school district.
On Joel Kotkin: I *hear* things like this, about people abandoning San Francisco and the Bay Area, and about people refusing to return to the office.
But then I live in the Bay Area and I *see* things like home prices going up 18% YoY and increasingly heavy traffic every morning to my office (as I go into “in-person” work!). I also hear my friends getting back into the swing of in-person meetings, travel, etc., and enjoying the re-socialization.
California obviously has issues. I wouldn’t tell my kids to move here after college. And I don’t deny there’s something going on that Kotkin is putting his finger on. But the facts on the ground do not completely support his narrative.
I don’t have a great counter-narrative. The best I can come up with is that Silicon Valley is becoming a sort of “c-suite” for companies, with the highest paying jobs at the most-profitable companies sitting here, with the lower paying jobs pushed to remote. I suspect people would cry foul at that characterization (i.e., those who’ve moved to Austin after going remote). I also suspect there will be a point in time when companies start applying their regional salary adjustments more vigorously. Those salary adjustments don’t just say “do the same job in different places, get different dollars”. They shape the type of jobs and responsibilities that occur in each place. The higher salaries confer higher status, irrespective of what goes out the other side in taxes and cost-of-living, and people want status. (Especially in Silicon Valley companies…)
Regardless, the next two or three years will be interesting, as we see the pandemic’s lasting effect on people’s lifestyles. It will be different than what came before, I’m sure. I also suspect it will be different than what anyone is quite able to perceive right now.
“But you could have done the same thing in the blogosphere”
I don’t think so. The thing about Twitter is if I reply to Mr Big Shot he feels compelled to reply back, particularly if my critique gets a lot of attention. The blogosphere might work like that too but the time it takes to compose a post and put it up makes it less likely. And if me and Mr Big Shot get into an argument in the blogosphere, it’s happening at a blog people might or might not visit, instead of in the town square. This makes it harder to let insults and critiques go unanswered. Plus I’m critiquing a lot more stuff on Twitter because of how low effort it is. Which sounds bad but I think there’s a lot of dumb stuff out there that deserves to be attacked and I wouldn’t have the time to write a blog post about everything. Twitter is instant gratification/psychological harm, so it pulls people in like nothing else.
Unasked for advice, but
1. The more you respond, the more likely it is you make a mistake. Everyone does.
2. The higher the scrutiny, the more costly that mistake will be. A mistake on Twitter can be intellectual death
The smart policy is to be risk averse.
I agree! I rarely answer critiques on Twitter unless I have to.
"Plus I’m critiquing a lot more stuff on Twitter because of how low effort it is. Which sounds bad but I think there’s a lot of dumb stuff out there that deserves to be attacked and I wouldn’t have the time to write a blog post about everything."
I think maybe you need to consider carefully whether all the things that deserve to be attacked are actually worth your time to do so. A thousand critiques a nanometer thick are probably not worth anything, and certainly not worth more than 1/day with some meat on the bones.
I think some of my charts mocking measures of “democracy” political scientists use have been very worthwhile and discrediting to the enterprise.
School policy is generally set by independently elected school boards and not bundled into other local governments. Doesn't seem to do a lot of good in big cities. Are there any well-done studies about the size at which a polity generally stops being effective and almost always gets captured by the institutions it's supposed to control?
On your point about Barry Weingast’s post, that has long seemed to me to be a really good argument for moderate constitutional reform, including things like:
- fixing the number of Supreme Court justices, to eliminate court packing
- making Supreme Court appointment be for a period of 18 years, so presidents predictably get to appoint one every two years
- prohibiting a president from pardoning himself
- making some version of the 60-vote rule in the senate constitutional
- etc
The hard part is that almost no one is incentivized to be a moderate, and many would look on these as barriers to their agenda.
Many areas have multiple, overlapping, independent, quasi governmental districts. The school district in my town is separate from the municipal government, and from the community college district. The boundaries aren’t quite the same. The people a block north of me are in the same town, but in a separate school district.