Ruy Teixeira and Yuval Levin on the two parties; N.S. Lyons on the global elites; Adam Ozimek and John Lettieri on building codes; Bryan Caplan on India; Rohit Krishnan on same
"What the Republican and Democratic coalitions have in common is enough strength to stalemate the other party but not enough to dominate."
They say that, "Stalemate is not the American party system's natural equilibrium." Um, yes it is. It's the consequence of incentives and exactly the kind of "political expediency" one should expect, the mechanism being that politicians and parties will adjust their positions and strategies to the extent necessary to avoid losing power and so contests at the scale that really matters (i.e., national) will tend to always stay close.
The mid 20th Century situation was not a "natural equilibrium" but on the contrary, a political disequilibrium of a special case of the old GOP being utterly destroyed in all but name during the New Deal Era and needing a very long time to reformulate and take advantage of population shifts to come back in from the wilderness and reestablish competitiveness.
"As of the late 1970s, the Democrats had controlled the House for forty years, and they also had dominated the Presidency and the Senate for much of that time. If the outcome is predetermined, there is no reason to bother fighting hard."
So why did this happen in the first place, and why has one party failed to gain the upper hand now? IE, when the Democrats were winning election after election from the '30's to the '70's, why didn't they push leftward until their coalition began to fragment and elections became competitive again? Or alternatively, with the combination of Neo-con foreign policy disasters and the large and growing human capital gap (hat tip to Richard Hanania) between left and right, why have the Democrats not been able to craft a durable majority over the last twenty years? I would hypothesize it has to do with the weakening of the parties themselves, as the old smoke-filled back rooms gave way to open primaries. I am open to other hypotheses as well, though.
You ask, "why have the Democrats not been able to craft a durable majority over the last twenty years?" but you already answered it with "why didn't they push leftward until their coalition began to fragment."
The Party exists to manage the problem of needing to make politically expedient compromises to unpopular ideological imperatives in order to get just enough money and votes to get and stay in power. This works by the "Unprincipled Exception" mechanism explained by Laurence Auster starting about 20 years ago, and one consequence is that - in combination with the adaptive institutional reflexes of competitive political equilibrium that is part of America's English cultural heritage - it tends to slow down the introduction of population-alienating radical measures instead of blowing up in sudden, bloody, all-encompassing, ideologically-driven cultural overthrows as with the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions.
What this means is that the perpetual power struggle between pragmatist fundraisers and vote-counters and doctrinaire ideologues is particularly intense for the leftist party. Pragmatists can hold back the demands of the ideologues, but -only- to the minimum extent necessary. Any time there is any slack available in terms of having a slight surplus of support, the ideologues can claim there is no good reason for the pragmatists to hold the line there, and they can play the status positioning game of competitive sanctimony and accuse the pragmatists of being insufficiently pious and devout, "I find your lack of faith disturbing."
So they are always pushing things farther and farther, in steps that are just as far as they can afford to get away with in the particular context. What one can observe by looking the history going back to the New Deal at least is the leftist party gradually eliminating unprincipled exceptions and jettisoning members of the coalition just as soon as it becomes pragmatically possible for them to do so. And being as unpopular as one can afford to be means that the aggregate of national-scope races will stay very competitive.
I find the Ozimek/Lettieri proposal to be baffling and vague, like a student article. Model zoning and building codes exist already and are widely implemented not just as American model codes but based on international standards. As they posit a federally defined code, it would violate the anti-commandeering doctrine. If it conditioned federal funding on acceptance of the codes, it would need to meet the Dole test, which it probably would not because the body of law that they'd be promoting is so complex so as to create infinite opportunities for litigation.
As an aside, $40 billion is just not enough to achieve any of these ends. That is less than one year of SNAP funding, and a $10,000 grant per house is somewhere between insulting and stupid. My suggestion is that the codes are not the problem, zoning is not the problem, and lack of money is not the problem. I share the authors' enthusiasm for SEZs, but what they proposed isn't an SEZ.
Your comment is well written and makes many excellent points. Thanks.
You prompt what I think is an interesting question. Occasionally AK shares a quote or link like this that would seem entirely contrary to his general viewpoint, mostly or entirely without comment. Why? Does he not see the fault? Is he purposely antagonizing his readers? Something else?
It has been said that vegetables cause mild hormesis when eaten because they contain low levels of toxins, and that this is good for you. Perhaps some links are like vegetables.
Actually, the IRC....the "International Residential Code"... is not based on any "international standard" because there is no international standard. It's kind of like calling our baseball playoffs the World Series....it's got little to do with the world being interested in baseball. Our IRC is predicated on a LOT of conditions that don't exist anywhere else, with building with wood being one of them.
American model codes are based on a Byzantine bunch of standards that became (more or less) standardized through the corporatization of model code writing and the consulting firms doing the writing.
The rest of it...I agree. All the "problems" that are cited are not the primary problem.
Thanks for the correction. I think your suggestion about the unusual nature of American building practices is also a supporting point as to why a federal building code (unless it had something like regional components to make it even more unwieldy and complex) would not really fix things. We already have a good example of impossible-to-comply with inanity in building standards created by federal law in the form of the ADA.
Another point worth making here is that we have many examples of successful (and mixed-success) model codes and model laws in many areas of American law, such as the UCC, the UPC, and the MPC. If a model code is a full of good ideas, state legislatures will adopt them without federal coercion. If the idea is so good, why would you need federal coercion?
More good points.... Anyone not involved in the industry...and even many IN the industry...do not understand how codes are written. Everyone imagines a bunch of smart engineer types figuring out what's good and going with it. Nope. It's largely industry reps (who often are engineers) pushing for stuff that benefits their stuff being mandated or otherwise funneling folks into using their practices and materials. The code nerds that are unaffiliated with any particular industry have a say, but what they say largely gums up the conversation and usually leads to ordinances supporting their particular hot button. I will leave out examples for the sake of brevity.
Model codes are often full of good ideas, but they aren't adopted because of those ideas. They are adopted because the folks in charge don't know anything about what they are adopting and if it's written by an "international" expert, who are they to dissent? The "experts" within individual municipalities are not experts; they're usually mopes that can't (or won't) get a better...and much better paying... job in the industry.
The various code promulgating authorities boil down to individuals whose job security is predicated on their particular code being adopted. Take ASTM...they're trying to insinuate themselves into everything now, introducing a whole 'nuther layer of bureaucracy into the mess.
If folks knew and understood how convoluted our building "standards" are, they'd revolt. They don't revolt because the entire topic is Byzantine and controlled by fiefdoms seeking dominance in code promulgation, and to understand it is to launch into alien and utterly incomprehensible boring discussion, something Americans aren't particularly good at.
Good discussion. I just want to add some anecdata to your point about fiefdoms: my dad was on the township commission in the little town I grew up for maybe a decade or so. From the outside looking in, you would think this little rust belt town would be friendly to most any kind of development, given the local economic picture, and the people on the commission would act accordingly. Nope! From what I could tell, my dad and his fellow commissioners loved nothing more than throwing their weight around by forcing everybody who had an inkling to build anything bigger than a doghouse to comply with every last letter of every part of the building code on the books. There didn't seem to be any real purpose to this other than that it made them feel important. This is in solidly red Trump country, and my dad is an ex small business owner and a solid Republican. Even he got the Eric Cartman "Respect My Authoritah!" bug.
"What causes the average driver in Indian roads to treat driving like a game of water filling cracks on the pavement? It's not trust, it's the lack of an agreed upon equilibrium. There's no norms to adhere to."
This is DC-metro traffic. Not as bad as India, but bad in its own way, and poor when graded on the US curve. It's a problem of Schelling coordination / Aumann-style "Common Knowledge". Good traffic involves "psychological-behavioral conventions" having a good feel for how all the other drivers will react in a given situation, and knowing that they too have a feel for what the other drivers will do, know, and feel, and "everybody knows that everybody knows" and so forth to functional equilibrium.
In the US there are plenty of places that still have "regional consensus driving norms", though, like strongly distinct regional accents, this had faded a lot in the last 50 years with increased intergenerational mobility and urbanization. There are places where everybody just drives pretty fast, but not too reckless or aggressive. There are places where everybody is aggressive. There are places where "midwest nice" prevails, almost, but not quite as good, as Japan-level. But what happens in DC is that is sucks in people from all over the country (and the world) with all those distinct driving "personalities" and styles and psychological reflexes which are surprisingly rigid and apparently hard and slow to adjust when dropped into a different regional equilibrium.
It doesn't take long for people to realize on an instinctive, visceral level that a lot of cars are doing things that go against what their instincts expected the cars to do, and this creates a general feeling of unease and discoordination and - I'm convinced - a higher rate of accidents for similar circumstances than in most other places in the US. Which is bad enough, but local authorities like to send seven firetrucks to every minor incident and this blocks things up terribly.
What you end up with is the traffic equivalent of Teddy Roosevelt's "polyglot boarding house" instead of "a nation" or a version of Kipling's description of The Stranger:
"The Stranger within my gate, He may be true or kind, But he does not talk my talk— I cannot feel his mind. I see the face and the eyes and the mouth, But not the soul behind ... The Stranger within my gates, He may be evil or good, But I cannot tell what powers control — What reasons sway his mood ..."
Agreed driving in other countries is usually different, often much different. I lived in DC many years and have been back there many times since then. We disagree re DC vs US.
Differences across the country - Speeding varies but is mostly or entirely a matter of enforcement, not culture. Similarly with road designs, particularly intersection design. Maybe some parts of the country have more slow drivers in the left lane. Lane splitting motorcycles in CA is a huge difference (in my opinion). To the extent it still happens, courtesy left turns in Boston at the start of the light cycle is very different.
Nice observation. And it rings pretty much true for India to me. The biggest problem is, of course, as always, education. In India, no one knows the norms so naturally none can follow them. Also, it varies depending on region like you pointed out but the baseline is different in India so casual observers might not be able to appreciate it.
Down here, an overreliance on signage perhaps is manifesting in problems that were once practically unknown - like wrong way drivers on the freeway - because our signs - our many, many signs - are only in English. It's a weird little lacuna when all government forms come written at least in Spanish, and businesses often have everything in both Spanish and English, and even a trip to Lowe's is a little primer ("plomeria". "herramientas"). Of course, we'd need more than Spanish ...
On the other hand, the DOT has mostly abandoned the practice of carefully signing and directing through construction zones (and it's *all* construction zones) and they are no longer striping lanes. So maybe we are moving toward a more "instinctive" pattern of driving.
About the EIG essay, have we not learned to be skeptical of any proposal that begins with, "First, the federal government would ..."
Ultimately, housing faces the same creep of expensive regulation that is causing automobiles to be increasingly expensive. Just as no one wants to be blamed for making automobiles "less safe", no one wants to be blamed for allowing environmentally damaging homes or even unsafe homes - new SFH construction in some counties requires a built in fire suppression system! Why? The risk of a SFH fire is so extremely low, but somehow this regulation got added and so an extra $50,000 cost got added to home construction.
The sad fact is that as long as the people making the rules profit from those rules and do not personally bear the cost of those rules, the rules will only get worse. A massive rollback on all regulation is needed across all of American society, but how do you make that happen? The rule makers are never going to put themselves out of a job!
> "I do not believe that “the public” ever was able to overcome elites. But Lyons points out something that is relatively recent."
Hypothesis: This is due to reduced competition of opposing interests among elites. Practical example: 40-50 years ago, a wasteful defense program (say a ship or a fighter jet) could be opposed by a competing contractor, competing interests within the navy, and different congressmen competing for the local benefits. Now, that competition amongst elites has waned due to consolidation, deindustrialization, and political calculation.
Philosophically, this is the playing out of Federalist #9 and 10. Where previously the US "enlarged the orbit" of democracy, increasingly, technological and social changes are doing the opposite. Elite interests couldn't previously coalesce and remained in competition are now able to cooperate better to extract more value at lower cost.
The fundamental problem in US housing is not under supply. That's just not correct or not nearly as correct as EIG would like to assume (but agreed it's a great think-tank). The fundamental problem is a shortage of places that people want to live.
#3: Sometimes the rules are neither zoning nor mere bureaucratic hurdles but actively prohibit density. I used to read an urbanist forum where their idea of addictive porn was attractive cityscape pictures of walkable places in Europe (when it wasn't pictures of, I dunno, Taipei). But then when it came down to brass tacks, they would say we couldn't build the particular multifamily buildings that were seen in the pictures because of some local rule about how many stairwells there must be for an x-plex (I've forgotten the details, but IIRC the idea was that in Europe, having one stairwell was acceptable).
Another bete noir was the local firefighters, who reliably stepped up to quash the dream of the narrow street that reduces car speeds and brings things in closer proximity. The problem was our fire trucks, like our police vehicles, have gotten bigger and bigger. And so a lot of the charm of the pictures was a non-starter just based on that, that our large firetrucks, which must always be large, had to be able to negotiate into any paved road-like space.
ADA obviously stood in the way of certain goals as well, but they were less courageous about mooting that.
What evidence is there that housing prices are a supply problem? The housing unit supply has been growing steadily for decades and increased by 6 million units over the past 4 years alone. (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ETOTALUSQ176N ) How could local regulation possibly account for the wide variance in monthly private housing construction, bouncing from 414,000 in August 2011 to 1,711,000 in October, 2022 (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNDCONTSA )?
And rent is decreasing. In September “The National Rent Index showed that the median one-bedroom rent decreased 0.1% this month to $1,533, while two-bedrooms fell 0.2% to $1,912. “
And who is this “we” that is supposed to do all this additional building that the market has apparently failed to provide? Builders, that’s who. And guess, what, they make the supply decisions and they make them based on projected demand. So for example, we can look to research by the National Association of Homebuilders estimating the number of households that can afford to buy a house at each price point. (https://www.nahb.org/-/media/NAHB/news-and-economics/docs/housing-economics-plus/special-studies/2024/special-study-households-cannot-afford-a-median-priced-new-home-april-2024.pdf?rev=cb6f4f7d507341cb9ece97b90b6709c3 ) where at figure 1 we see that the most some 40.5 million households can afford to spend to buy a house is $150,000. And the number of household able to spend more declines sharply at each price point. But this can only be explained by local zoning ordnances of course, not the nation’s abysmal performance on median earnings (
One supposes that given the generally ineffectual campaign to mandate high density housing, we are all better off with its advocates remaining occupied with that lost cause than elsewhere where they might actually do damage.
I'm rather more optimistic on zoning and building code reforms. I don't think they are really a conspiracy of existing homeowners to preserve their land rent values. I (naively?) think that residents just don't see the advantages of letting builders' and prospective owners' mutual benefit and its spillovers onto municipal tax revenues.
Lyons: I'm quite suspicious of contrasting "global" interests" with "national" ones. Often it is cover for opposing things that are _in _the national interest like freer trade or merit based immigration. Even the failure to control the border cost effectively is not a "national"/"global" interest issue.
Adam Ozimek and John Lettieri don't know what they are talking about. This might be the most factually challenge piece you've ever shared.
It would be stupid to have the same building code in earthquake prone California as hurricane prone Florida.
We already have a small number of national buildings codes with a variety of provisions for hurricanes, earthquakes, fire, and other things. Most locales adopt one of these. Some add a bit and that can be annoying but really doesn't prevent building housing.
The problem isn't building codes. It is zoning. Maybe zoning for a high density area could be created but do you really think that would be more successful against NIMBYs?
And then there's environmental hazards, historic preservation, and other issues that can have uniform laws but still lots of disagreements on how to apply.
The problem in houseing is that once you own a house, you have enormous incentive to keep the price of your house from going down. If the price of your house falls below the remaining amount of your mortage, you're in trouble. If prices go up, you gain equity. if you move, the increase in the price of your house offsets the increase in the price of the house you buy.
Given these incentives, most people will oppose actions that will reduce the price of homes. Opposition to low cost housing is the result of these incentives.
#2: It's worth pointing out, since he *has to* equate tentative international efforts re climate change with the very deliberate decision by the elite to effect mass migrations of people that otherwise would not have occurred - that the Montreal Protocol is the most successful example of international cooperation in our lifetimes, and there is no reason climate action should be any different or more politicized.
This is just a PR success of diplomats and politicians taking credit properly due to STEM innovators. The Montreal Protocol was successful because (1) there already existed substitutes for the subject halocarbons that weren't much more expensive or (2) the target of special political sensitivities, and (3) the total amount spent on them is a very small fraction of the overall economy. There are no such substitutes for the activity that emits CO2. Nuclear can do it, is doing it in East Asia, but not for the west. Yet.
I saw a comment thread yesterday somewhere, which turned on whether or not the American man-in-space program had been a "nationalized" or even "national" effort. The commenter arguing agin said not because unlike the USSR, the government contracted with Chrysler, McDonnell, Western Electric, Lockheed or whatever ... This perhaps showed the perils of defining things in peculiar ways with reference to some sort of arbitrary binary.
Blogs like this and their audiences naturally genuflect to STEM (an acronym which mercifully didn't exist in 1987) out of an abundance of (perhaps insecure) admiration for the "doers". The trouble with this tendency taken to extreme (as everything now must be) is that it deflects from the need for world leaders, even if they are but "thinkers" or (oh jeez) "wordcels", to make sensible decisions. Doers don't necessarily know what needs doing any more than the rest of us, and everything they can and wish to do is certainly not necessarily worth doing (The Line?).
Technology creates much of value but it's people that have values (or not).
Was Boeing going to independently land a spacecraft on the moon for reasons of corporate strategy?
I apologize if I have picked a poor example, because I think it was a cool achievement and unlikely to be topped in my lifetime or probably ever, but I realize many people now consider the moon landing to have been a waste of money. Ah, but don't blame "STEM" for that.
"What the Republican and Democratic coalitions have in common is enough strength to stalemate the other party but not enough to dominate."
They say that, "Stalemate is not the American party system's natural equilibrium." Um, yes it is. It's the consequence of incentives and exactly the kind of "political expediency" one should expect, the mechanism being that politicians and parties will adjust their positions and strategies to the extent necessary to avoid losing power and so contests at the scale that really matters (i.e., national) will tend to always stay close.
The mid 20th Century situation was not a "natural equilibrium" but on the contrary, a political disequilibrium of a special case of the old GOP being utterly destroyed in all but name during the New Deal Era and needing a very long time to reformulate and take advantage of population shifts to come back in from the wilderness and reestablish competitiveness.
"As of the late 1970s, the Democrats had controlled the House for forty years, and they also had dominated the Presidency and the Senate for much of that time. If the outcome is predetermined, there is no reason to bother fighting hard."
So why did this happen in the first place, and why has one party failed to gain the upper hand now? IE, when the Democrats were winning election after election from the '30's to the '70's, why didn't they push leftward until their coalition began to fragment and elections became competitive again? Or alternatively, with the combination of Neo-con foreign policy disasters and the large and growing human capital gap (hat tip to Richard Hanania) between left and right, why have the Democrats not been able to craft a durable majority over the last twenty years? I would hypothesize it has to do with the weakening of the parties themselves, as the old smoke-filled back rooms gave way to open primaries. I am open to other hypotheses as well, though.
The 1930s-1970s coalition included Southern Democratic Senators, who kept the Democrats from going hard left.
Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks.
You ask, "why have the Democrats not been able to craft a durable majority over the last twenty years?" but you already answered it with "why didn't they push leftward until their coalition began to fragment."
The Party exists to manage the problem of needing to make politically expedient compromises to unpopular ideological imperatives in order to get just enough money and votes to get and stay in power. This works by the "Unprincipled Exception" mechanism explained by Laurence Auster starting about 20 years ago, and one consequence is that - in combination with the adaptive institutional reflexes of competitive political equilibrium that is part of America's English cultural heritage - it tends to slow down the introduction of population-alienating radical measures instead of blowing up in sudden, bloody, all-encompassing, ideologically-driven cultural overthrows as with the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions.
What this means is that the perpetual power struggle between pragmatist fundraisers and vote-counters and doctrinaire ideologues is particularly intense for the leftist party. Pragmatists can hold back the demands of the ideologues, but -only- to the minimum extent necessary. Any time there is any slack available in terms of having a slight surplus of support, the ideologues can claim there is no good reason for the pragmatists to hold the line there, and they can play the status positioning game of competitive sanctimony and accuse the pragmatists of being insufficiently pious and devout, "I find your lack of faith disturbing."
So they are always pushing things farther and farther, in steps that are just as far as they can afford to get away with in the particular context. What one can observe by looking the history going back to the New Deal at least is the leftist party gradually eliminating unprincipled exceptions and jettisoning members of the coalition just as soon as it becomes pragmatically possible for them to do so. And being as unpopular as one can afford to be means that the aggregate of national-scope races will stay very competitive.
I find the Ozimek/Lettieri proposal to be baffling and vague, like a student article. Model zoning and building codes exist already and are widely implemented not just as American model codes but based on international standards. As they posit a federally defined code, it would violate the anti-commandeering doctrine. If it conditioned federal funding on acceptance of the codes, it would need to meet the Dole test, which it probably would not because the body of law that they'd be promoting is so complex so as to create infinite opportunities for litigation.
As an aside, $40 billion is just not enough to achieve any of these ends. That is less than one year of SNAP funding, and a $10,000 grant per house is somewhere between insulting and stupid. My suggestion is that the codes are not the problem, zoning is not the problem, and lack of money is not the problem. I share the authors' enthusiasm for SEZs, but what they proposed isn't an SEZ.
Your comment is well written and makes many excellent points. Thanks.
You prompt what I think is an interesting question. Occasionally AK shares a quote or link like this that would seem entirely contrary to his general viewpoint, mostly or entirely without comment. Why? Does he not see the fault? Is he purposely antagonizing his readers? Something else?
It has been said that vegetables cause mild hormesis when eaten because they contain low levels of toxins, and that this is good for you. Perhaps some links are like vegetables.
That's definitely a possibility.
Actually, the IRC....the "International Residential Code"... is not based on any "international standard" because there is no international standard. It's kind of like calling our baseball playoffs the World Series....it's got little to do with the world being interested in baseball. Our IRC is predicated on a LOT of conditions that don't exist anywhere else, with building with wood being one of them.
American model codes are based on a Byzantine bunch of standards that became (more or less) standardized through the corporatization of model code writing and the consulting firms doing the writing.
The rest of it...I agree. All the "problems" that are cited are not the primary problem.
Thanks for the correction. I think your suggestion about the unusual nature of American building practices is also a supporting point as to why a federal building code (unless it had something like regional components to make it even more unwieldy and complex) would not really fix things. We already have a good example of impossible-to-comply with inanity in building standards created by federal law in the form of the ADA.
Another point worth making here is that we have many examples of successful (and mixed-success) model codes and model laws in many areas of American law, such as the UCC, the UPC, and the MPC. If a model code is a full of good ideas, state legislatures will adopt them without federal coercion. If the idea is so good, why would you need federal coercion?
More good points.... Anyone not involved in the industry...and even many IN the industry...do not understand how codes are written. Everyone imagines a bunch of smart engineer types figuring out what's good and going with it. Nope. It's largely industry reps (who often are engineers) pushing for stuff that benefits their stuff being mandated or otherwise funneling folks into using their practices and materials. The code nerds that are unaffiliated with any particular industry have a say, but what they say largely gums up the conversation and usually leads to ordinances supporting their particular hot button. I will leave out examples for the sake of brevity.
Model codes are often full of good ideas, but they aren't adopted because of those ideas. They are adopted because the folks in charge don't know anything about what they are adopting and if it's written by an "international" expert, who are they to dissent? The "experts" within individual municipalities are not experts; they're usually mopes that can't (or won't) get a better...and much better paying... job in the industry.
The various code promulgating authorities boil down to individuals whose job security is predicated on their particular code being adopted. Take ASTM...they're trying to insinuate themselves into everything now, introducing a whole 'nuther layer of bureaucracy into the mess.
If folks knew and understood how convoluted our building "standards" are, they'd revolt. They don't revolt because the entire topic is Byzantine and controlled by fiefdoms seeking dominance in code promulgation, and to understand it is to launch into alien and utterly incomprehensible boring discussion, something Americans aren't particularly good at.
Good discussion. I just want to add some anecdata to your point about fiefdoms: my dad was on the township commission in the little town I grew up for maybe a decade or so. From the outside looking in, you would think this little rust belt town would be friendly to most any kind of development, given the local economic picture, and the people on the commission would act accordingly. Nope! From what I could tell, my dad and his fellow commissioners loved nothing more than throwing their weight around by forcing everybody who had an inkling to build anything bigger than a doghouse to comply with every last letter of every part of the building code on the books. There didn't seem to be any real purpose to this other than that it made them feel important. This is in solidly red Trump country, and my dad is an ex small business owner and a solid Republican. Even he got the Eric Cartman "Respect My Authoritah!" bug.
"What causes the average driver in Indian roads to treat driving like a game of water filling cracks on the pavement? It's not trust, it's the lack of an agreed upon equilibrium. There's no norms to adhere to."
This is DC-metro traffic. Not as bad as India, but bad in its own way, and poor when graded on the US curve. It's a problem of Schelling coordination / Aumann-style "Common Knowledge". Good traffic involves "psychological-behavioral conventions" having a good feel for how all the other drivers will react in a given situation, and knowing that they too have a feel for what the other drivers will do, know, and feel, and "everybody knows that everybody knows" and so forth to functional equilibrium.
In the US there are plenty of places that still have "regional consensus driving norms", though, like strongly distinct regional accents, this had faded a lot in the last 50 years with increased intergenerational mobility and urbanization. There are places where everybody just drives pretty fast, but not too reckless or aggressive. There are places where everybody is aggressive. There are places where "midwest nice" prevails, almost, but not quite as good, as Japan-level. But what happens in DC is that is sucks in people from all over the country (and the world) with all those distinct driving "personalities" and styles and psychological reflexes which are surprisingly rigid and apparently hard and slow to adjust when dropped into a different regional equilibrium.
It doesn't take long for people to realize on an instinctive, visceral level that a lot of cars are doing things that go against what their instincts expected the cars to do, and this creates a general feeling of unease and discoordination and - I'm convinced - a higher rate of accidents for similar circumstances than in most other places in the US. Which is bad enough, but local authorities like to send seven firetrucks to every minor incident and this blocks things up terribly.
What you end up with is the traffic equivalent of Teddy Roosevelt's "polyglot boarding house" instead of "a nation" or a version of Kipling's description of The Stranger:
"The Stranger within my gate, He may be true or kind, But he does not talk my talk— I cannot feel his mind. I see the face and the eyes and the mouth, But not the soul behind ... The Stranger within my gates, He may be evil or good, But I cannot tell what powers control — What reasons sway his mood ..."
I looked up the poem and enjoyed reading it. Thanks for the reference.
I love that you think driving in DC is different than other US cities.
I've lived and driven all over the US and in other countries. Yeah, DC driving is different.
Apologies for not asking. What do you think is different?
Agreed driving in other countries is usually different, often much different. I lived in DC many years and have been back there many times since then. We disagree re DC vs US.
Differences across the country - Speeding varies but is mostly or entirely a matter of enforcement, not culture. Similarly with road designs, particularly intersection design. Maybe some parts of the country have more slow drivers in the left lane. Lane splitting motorcycles in CA is a huge difference (in my opinion). To the extent it still happens, courtesy left turns in Boston at the start of the light cycle is very different.
Nice observation. And it rings pretty much true for India to me. The biggest problem is, of course, as always, education. In India, no one knows the norms so naturally none can follow them. Also, it varies depending on region like you pointed out but the baseline is different in India so casual observers might not be able to appreciate it.
Down here, an overreliance on signage perhaps is manifesting in problems that were once practically unknown - like wrong way drivers on the freeway - because our signs - our many, many signs - are only in English. It's a weird little lacuna when all government forms come written at least in Spanish, and businesses often have everything in both Spanish and English, and even a trip to Lowe's is a little primer ("plomeria". "herramientas"). Of course, we'd need more than Spanish ...
On the other hand, the DOT has mostly abandoned the practice of carefully signing and directing through construction zones (and it's *all* construction zones) and they are no longer striping lanes. So maybe we are moving toward a more "instinctive" pattern of driving.
About the EIG essay, have we not learned to be skeptical of any proposal that begins with, "First, the federal government would ..."
Ultimately, housing faces the same creep of expensive regulation that is causing automobiles to be increasingly expensive. Just as no one wants to be blamed for making automobiles "less safe", no one wants to be blamed for allowing environmentally damaging homes or even unsafe homes - new SFH construction in some counties requires a built in fire suppression system! Why? The risk of a SFH fire is so extremely low, but somehow this regulation got added and so an extra $50,000 cost got added to home construction.
The sad fact is that as long as the people making the rules profit from those rules and do not personally bear the cost of those rules, the rules will only get worse. A massive rollback on all regulation is needed across all of American society, but how do you make that happen? The rule makers are never going to put themselves out of a job!
> "I do not believe that “the public” ever was able to overcome elites. But Lyons points out something that is relatively recent."
Hypothesis: This is due to reduced competition of opposing interests among elites. Practical example: 40-50 years ago, a wasteful defense program (say a ship or a fighter jet) could be opposed by a competing contractor, competing interests within the navy, and different congressmen competing for the local benefits. Now, that competition amongst elites has waned due to consolidation, deindustrialization, and political calculation.
Philosophically, this is the playing out of Federalist #9 and 10. Where previously the US "enlarged the orbit" of democracy, increasingly, technological and social changes are doing the opposite. Elite interests couldn't previously coalesce and remained in competition are now able to cooperate better to extract more value at lower cost.
The fundamental problem in US housing is not under supply. That's just not correct or not nearly as correct as EIG would like to assume (but agreed it's a great think-tank). The fundamental problem is a shortage of places that people want to live.
#3: Sometimes the rules are neither zoning nor mere bureaucratic hurdles but actively prohibit density. I used to read an urbanist forum where their idea of addictive porn was attractive cityscape pictures of walkable places in Europe (when it wasn't pictures of, I dunno, Taipei). But then when it came down to brass tacks, they would say we couldn't build the particular multifamily buildings that were seen in the pictures because of some local rule about how many stairwells there must be for an x-plex (I've forgotten the details, but IIRC the idea was that in Europe, having one stairwell was acceptable).
Another bete noir was the local firefighters, who reliably stepped up to quash the dream of the narrow street that reduces car speeds and brings things in closer proximity. The problem was our fire trucks, like our police vehicles, have gotten bigger and bigger. And so a lot of the charm of the pictures was a non-starter just based on that, that our large firetrucks, which must always be large, had to be able to negotiate into any paved road-like space.
ADA obviously stood in the way of certain goals as well, but they were less courageous about mooting that.
What evidence is there that housing prices are a supply problem? The housing unit supply has been growing steadily for decades and increased by 6 million units over the past 4 years alone. (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ETOTALUSQ176N ) How could local regulation possibly account for the wide variance in monthly private housing construction, bouncing from 414,000 in August 2011 to 1,711,000 in October, 2022 (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNDCONTSA )?
And rent is decreasing. In September “The National Rent Index showed that the median one-bedroom rent decreased 0.1% this month to $1,533, while two-bedrooms fell 0.2% to $1,912. “
“https://www.zumper.com/blog/rental-price-data/ ) And this despite rental unit inventory remaining flat. (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ERNTOCCUSQ176N ) One might wonder whether the Covid eviction moratorium has anything to do with people being leery of getting into the landlord game?
And who is this “we” that is supposed to do all this additional building that the market has apparently failed to provide? Builders, that’s who. And guess, what, they make the supply decisions and they make them based on projected demand. So for example, we can look to research by the National Association of Homebuilders estimating the number of households that can afford to buy a house at each price point. (https://www.nahb.org/-/media/NAHB/news-and-economics/docs/housing-economics-plus/special-studies/2024/special-study-households-cannot-afford-a-median-priced-new-home-april-2024.pdf?rev=cb6f4f7d507341cb9ece97b90b6709c3 ) where at figure 1 we see that the most some 40.5 million households can afford to spend to buy a house is $150,000. And the number of household able to spend more declines sharply at each price point. But this can only be explained by local zoning ordnances of course, not the nation’s abysmal performance on median earnings (
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q ) or the stagnant full time employment figures in recent years (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12500000 ).
The fact of the matter is that zoning changes have already been tried widely and found to be of trivial impact: “We find that reforms that loosen restrictions are associated with a statistically significant 0.8 percent increase in housing supply within three to nine years of reform passage, accounting for new and existing stock.” (https://www.urban.org/research/publication/land-use-reforms-and-housing-costs ) The cities that are building the most houses ( https://constructioncoverage.com/research/cities-investing-most-in-new-housing ) are not the cities pushing high density living: https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/articles/2022-12-state-by-state-guide-to-zoning-reform/
On the other hand, cities with solid blue collar employment opportunities are not the ones we typically associate with housing shortages (https://www.globaltrademag.com/cities-with-the-most-successful-blue-collar-workers/ )
And zoning changes are not going to address such basic demand side problems such as the aging of the population (https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/05/2020-census-united-states-older-population-grew.html ), the huge increase in the number of single resident households (https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-quarter-all-households-have-one-person.html ), our dystopian rate of children living in single parent households (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/12/12/u-s-children-more-likely-than-children-in-other-countries-to-live-with-just-one-parent/ ) , nor the increasing trend of families with young children seeking a higher quality of life outside the cities (https://www.reckon.news/news/2023/07/this-is-why-young-families-are-leaving-cities-en-masse.html ) or moving to be closer to family.
One supposes that given the generally ineffectual campaign to mandate high density housing, we are all better off with its advocates remaining occupied with that lost cause than elsewhere where they might actually do damage.
It’s very strange. I guess it dates back to the Clinton administration wanting to hook people up with mortgages (whether or no).
I recall it was the single big question on the 2010 census (rather than, say, occupation): do you own or rent?
There are a heck of a lot of empty bedrooms in America.
I’m not aware of anyone being homeless because there wasn’t a house for them to buy.
Just a strange obsession, must be traceable to something.
Possibly just the same folks who didn’t care what went on in your bedroom, having a mysterious concern where that bedroom is.
is there a word/idiom for reverse regulatory capture where a private corporation business becomes primarily fulfilling government regulations
Caplan is right about India, but it's hardly news; it what I heard in graduate "Developmental Economics" classes in the '60's.
I'm rather more optimistic on zoning and building code reforms. I don't think they are really a conspiracy of existing homeowners to preserve their land rent values. I (naively?) think that residents just don't see the advantages of letting builders' and prospective owners' mutual benefit and its spillovers onto municipal tax revenues.
Lyons: I'm quite suspicious of contrasting "global" interests" with "national" ones. Often it is cover for opposing things that are _in _the national interest like freer trade or merit based immigration. Even the failure to control the border cost effectively is not a "national"/"global" interest issue.
Adam Ozimek and John Lettieri don't know what they are talking about. This might be the most factually challenge piece you've ever shared.
It would be stupid to have the same building code in earthquake prone California as hurricane prone Florida.
We already have a small number of national buildings codes with a variety of provisions for hurricanes, earthquakes, fire, and other things. Most locales adopt one of these. Some add a bit and that can be annoying but really doesn't prevent building housing.
The problem isn't building codes. It is zoning. Maybe zoning for a high density area could be created but do you really think that would be more successful against NIMBYs?
And then there's environmental hazards, historic preservation, and other issues that can have uniform laws but still lots of disagreements on how to apply.
The problem in houseing is that once you own a house, you have enormous incentive to keep the price of your house from going down. If the price of your house falls below the remaining amount of your mortage, you're in trouble. If prices go up, you gain equity. if you move, the increase in the price of your house offsets the increase in the price of the house you buy.
Given these incentives, most people will oppose actions that will reduce the price of homes. Opposition to low cost housing is the result of these incentives.
#2: It's worth pointing out, since he *has to* equate tentative international efforts re climate change with the very deliberate decision by the elite to effect mass migrations of people that otherwise would not have occurred - that the Montreal Protocol is the most successful example of international cooperation in our lifetimes, and there is no reason climate action should be any different or more politicized.
This is just a PR success of diplomats and politicians taking credit properly due to STEM innovators. The Montreal Protocol was successful because (1) there already existed substitutes for the subject halocarbons that weren't much more expensive or (2) the target of special political sensitivities, and (3) the total amount spent on them is a very small fraction of the overall economy. There are no such substitutes for the activity that emits CO2. Nuclear can do it, is doing it in East Asia, but not for the west. Yet.
I saw a comment thread yesterday somewhere, which turned on whether or not the American man-in-space program had been a "nationalized" or even "national" effort. The commenter arguing agin said not because unlike the USSR, the government contracted with Chrysler, McDonnell, Western Electric, Lockheed or whatever ... This perhaps showed the perils of defining things in peculiar ways with reference to some sort of arbitrary binary.
Blogs like this and their audiences naturally genuflect to STEM (an acronym which mercifully didn't exist in 1987) out of an abundance of (perhaps insecure) admiration for the "doers". The trouble with this tendency taken to extreme (as everything now must be) is that it deflects from the need for world leaders, even if they are but "thinkers" or (oh jeez) "wordcels", to make sensible decisions. Doers don't necessarily know what needs doing any more than the rest of us, and everything they can and wish to do is certainly not necessarily worth doing (The Line?).
Technology creates much of value but it's people that have values (or not).
Was Boeing going to independently land a spacecraft on the moon for reasons of corporate strategy?
I apologize if I have picked a poor example, because I think it was a cool achievement and unlikely to be topped in my lifetime or probably ever, but I realize many people now consider the moon landing to have been a waste of money. Ah, but don't blame "STEM" for that.