Links to Consider, 10/23/2024
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
Ruy Teixeira and Yuval Levin write,
What the Republican and Democratic coalitions have in common is enough strength to stalemate the other party but not enough to dominate. As a result, a noxious back-and-forth has defined American politics for a generation. Can the deadlock be broken?
When John Samples and I had our conversation last week (which I failed to record properly, sorry), he suggested that one reason that our politics is so contentious is that elections are close. 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.
Since the 1980s, the House, Senate, and Presidency have been up for grabs. Samples suggests that the harder the two parties fight for control, the more they emphasize reasons to fear the other side.
once they are shielded from democratic accountability, policies and priorities pursued through the public-private partnership model naturally become particularly ripe for rent seeking, regulatory capture, corruption, and abuse. Or, worse, there develops a gross distortion of basic interests between the “agents” involved and their true “owners” – that is, the public.
I do not believe that “the public” ever was able to overcome elites. But Lyons points out something that is relatively recent.
More and more often today, we see one particular distortion above all coming to the fore with use of the public-private partnership model. That distortion is the synchronized advancement of so-called “global” interests over national ones.
The way I have put it is that American elites are more comfortable in Prague than in Peoria.
Adam Ozimek and John Lettieri write,
The main reason housing is too expensive is that we don’t build nearly enough of it. The most recent estimates from Freddie Mac place the national shortfall at a staggering 3.8 million housing units. This gaping hole in the country’s housing supply negatively impacts nearly every aspect of American life, reducing economic growth and hindering workers and families from achieving the lives they desire.
…the next president should stimulate reform by directly rewarding tangible results at scale — an idea that we call “Density Zones.”
Here is how it would work. First, the federal government would establish a standardized zoning and building code drawn from best practices nationwide and designed to allow builders to meet local housing demand without having to navigate onerous bureaucratic hurdles.
Second, municipalities would be given the opportunity to adopt this code for specific areas within their jurisdiction, be they individual blocks or neighborhoods, or entire redevelopment districts. Developers in these Density Zones, in turn, would have clear and predictable rules within which to operate, eliminating the interminable delays and setbacks that currently drive up costs and reduce the number of units that come onto the market.
Local jurisdictions could opt in to less onerous regulations. My guess is that few would do so. But EIG is an interesting think tank, and I have eagerly subscribed to their substack.
why is India still so poor? All libertarian bias aside, India’s central problem is absurd regulation and state ownership. Absurd how? To start: The Indian government strictly protects legal employees, so 90%+ of Indians work “informally.” Our bus driver to Agra was required to take a rest stop every two hours — in a country packed with tuk-tuk drivers zooming around like maniacs. The government caps the maximum size of farms — and bars foreigners (including Non-Resident Indians!) from owning farms at all. A great way to strangle the food supply and impoverish farmers at the same time. The Indian government also crushes construction, most notably with its infamous Floor Area Ratio regulation — in a country where plenty of people sleep on the streets. Developers aren’t even allowed to build skyscrapers in slums — and housing prices in major cities rival those in top Western cities. What about state ownership? Locals told me that private Indian schools cost parents one-tenth as much as public Indian schools cost taxpayers.
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.
We might as well call those norms culture.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
substacks referenced above:@
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"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.