Rationalists vs. Community
Be careful what you wish for
In an interesting and wide-ranging podcast with Erik Torenberg and others, Noah Smith says,
we have farmed out our regulatory policy to localities to a large degree and what you have is nimbyism everywhere where people just block anything this I'm not saying this is all of our problem because there's other problems too but this is a big part of it and this is what differentiates us from a lot of other countries
He is answering the question of why it is so difficult to build infrastructure in the United States. He goes on to say,
leftism of the 70s was very honestly a localist pastoralist Movement . . .liberalism and leftism was went in very hard for localism and this idea of community also being a very diverse country you have people who want to become homogeneous communities or who already are who want to keep it that way uh on the left as well as the right um you know like people like hippies in Vermont don't want you know a bunch of business Bros moving in or whatever and so this is our Legacy of localism and of spreading out and everybody doing their own thing in their own little village
I have an example that illustrates Smith’s point. Back in the early 1970s, when I was attending Swarthmore College, a major environmentalist cause among local residents, supported by students and faculty, was to fight against what was known as the “Blue Route,” a highway that allegedly was going to cause harm to Crum Creek, a local stream. Eventually, their objections were overcome, and the Blue Route (Interstate 476) was finally completed in 1992. No doubt the cost ended up orders of magnitude higher because of the delays caused by the local environmentalists.
For Noah Smith, “localism” is a boo-word. Local communities protect themselves from transportation infrastructure, housing construction, and upward mobility for the economically disadvantaged. He believes that on grounds of both efficiency and equity it would be better to override local vetoes.
I am sympathetic to Smith’s position, which Jacob T. Levy would call rationalist. But we ought to be careful what we wish for.
“Community” is a yay-word. We express nostalgia for the organizations of civil society and regret for “bowling alone.” But we fail to connect the dots between rationalist victories over “localism” and the “loss of community.”
Consider national welfare policy. The rationalist goal is to provide resources to people who are unemployed and/or in poverty, to keep them from falling through the cracks. But as sociologist Robert Nisbet emphasized, the result is to squeeze out local charitable institutions. Churches and labor unions used to provide a form of income insurance in local communities, and as those functions get taken over by the central government, the local institutions wither.
Consider Civil Rights laws. National legislation overrode the Jim Crow laws of the old South. While Barry Goldwater and others on the right opposed the Civil Rights laws on the principle that they violated Federalism, it seems to me that this opposition was on the wrong side of history. In the context of blatant racial discrimination, the rationalist argument in favor of the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s seems right.
But fast-forward to today, and the long-run impact of nationalizing the issue of race relations seems more problematic. Recently, Christopher Caldwell and Richard Hanania have pointed out how civil rights evolved into the Orwellian bureaucracy of diversity, equity, and inclusion. What originated as legislation intended to stop discrimination by local institutions has become intrusive quota-monitoring that poisons race relations within an even broader set of local institutions.
As another example, consider the rationalist case for economic progress through automation and free trade. Many local communities have clearly suffered from the process of creative destruction.
I believe that nations face a conflict between rationalism and the strength of local communities. That is, the most rational policies at the national level can undermine local community strength and solidarity, and vice-versa.
Almost every other large country has difficulty managing this conflict. If you run down the list of the ten largest countries by population, you see mostly a dismal array of underdevelopment, authoritarianism, or both.
Many conservatives celebrate America’s civil society and principles of Federalism. If anything, they are nostalgic for an era in which fewer problems were addressed at the level of central government. In this way, they are in conflict with rationalists.
The rationalists are not always wrong. But they (or we, in the case of rationalist libertarians) are not always right, either.
This essay is part of a series on human interdependence.
Took my kids to the library.
Book featured on shelf above kids books is a kids book called The Protest. Five kids of various races find out that a developer wants to build something on top of their vegetable garden. Kids are sad because they can possibly get vegetables from anywhere without the garden. Adults are sad that “the city is changing fast with new people and buildings”. They decide to organize protest chanting “no, cars, no! Let our garden grow!”
In the end they are successful in getting development cancelled and are overjoyed. They vow to be ready the next time a developer tries to build something in their neighborhood.
I see lots of screwed up race, gender, and an activists books at the library these days, but this is the first time I’ve seen a NIMBY book.
1) I'd like to posit a reason for NIMBYism that I've never seen anyone address.
Namely, people who have had a home built by one of the big development companies often hate the experience.
I myself had a lot of difficulty with them and felt like I had to constantly be involved to keep from getting screwed. Lots of dishonesties in the sales process came up. I had to have a brinkmanship negotiation with the developer the week of closing to get basic things finished on my house. Later on I found out that the developer had stolen all of the top soil from my home to sell on the market, meaning all of the grass they put in started to die. They did this to everyone in my development. Also, the workmen they hired literally just through their trash in the lawn and covered it with dirt. I and all my neighbors would dig up coke cans and other trash in our lawns after we move in.
Others had it worse than me. One has a pretty bad supporting beam installation. Another had their house flood multiple times. I won't go down the entire list of problems.
And we supposedly went with a slightly higher end developer with a better reputation!
It was bad enough that I went to a printing store to get a sign made to protest outside the development sales office if they didn't fix the issues before our closing. And you know what, the person running the printing shop has made signs to protest developers before many times. Not from activists, but from dissatisfied homeowners. Apparently this is a common thing.
I live in a town where 90% of housing stock is less than twenty years old. Basically all of it was built by one of the big names (Ryan Homes, etc). So you would think a community composed entirely of people that bought from a developer would like developers and be YIMBY.
But no. The anti-growth (I would say extreme anti-growth) mayor/council has won every election for over a decade including a recent one. During the campaign someone spray painted "developer" over the campaign signage of the opposition candidates. Like it was a swear word.
I would pose that as long as the homebuilding industry is allowed to practice in this manner that its going to be very hard to get traction on YIMBY.
2) As to rationalism vs localism, its relatively easy to say "we are going to override this local failure", but harder not to have the solution become its own failure mode.
During the pandemic people who were dissatisfied with NY/CA could at least move to FL/TX. Of course lots of people thought it was a crime that dumb red states should be able to ignore the science and kill people! The CDC and the federal government shouldn't allow it! And in many ways national institutions public and private did impose their views on red states.
If you want EXIT, you need localism.
3) Finally, the "rationalist" perspective often just means "rational, ignoring context." Civil Rights did end a lot of problems, but it also completely destroyed our cities in a massive crime wave. The Fair Housing Act did end whites only communities, and also cause people to triple down on zoning and sprawl to avoid blacks.
I have no doubt there is some irrational NIMBYism out there (I've seen it), but a lot of it is just a backdoor answer to failures in public order and public education that the people who scream about NIMBY are scared to fix.