Feb 26, 2023·edited Feb 26, 2023Liked by Arnold Kling
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.
Small local builders put their customers through hell, also. I don't know anyone who bought a house as it was being built who had a good experience. But I don't think that bad experiences with buying homes is what makes people NIMBY.
I’m not making a commentary about local vs national builders. I have no clue who’s better.
I’m simply saying that there a lot of incentives in the industry for corner cutting and dishonesty that turn people off. I don’t think it’s THE reason for NIMBY, but I think it’s pretty relevant in my town and I’ve never seen people discuss it.
Maybe curtailing some of the worst practices in the industry might help. Just like controllling crime better would help.
At this point it is very difficult to tell which causes which. Nimby regulations mean that large amounts of resources go into simply getting permission to build a home or development, it also means that getting permission for one frequently means not getting permission for another, and finally speed becomes of the essence because the longer the project goes on the higher the chance a NIMBY lawsuit puts it on hold which is the worst case sceanrio. Local reputation doesn't matter to the builders because of this, but also they are continually cyclying through subcontractors and not holding their own employees because their next job might be a 2 hour commute. Subs get paid when the work is completed and so make more the faster they work, which leads to some bad incentives. I know a manager who runs large commercial projects and his outright statement is that in every major building there are bottles of urine in the walls where contractors pee, screw the cap on and drywall over them despite it being his (and his companies) policy to encourage real bathroom breaks.
It seems to me that “mastering the local regulatory bureaucracy” is way more important for most developer’s businesses than actual construction. If anything, all of the “rents” imposed in the land acquisition cost means that there is even more emphasis on making construction as cheap as possible.
Since there us often only one developer serving an attractive location there are many monopolistic aspects of home construction.
Anyway all of the above add up to “we build it our way and if you don’t like it we will sell to the next guy in line”
Great essay. Rationalism / utilitarianism would be in a more solid position if we could easily calculate the downstream effects of policy on culture. Since we can’t, most rationalists / utilitarians tend to underestimate or ignore cultural considerations. I understand your human interdependence essay series in part as a laudable attempt to patch this gap.
Maybe I'm not plugged into to rationalist community enough, why is broad-scale policy being explicitly coded as rationalist? Feels like a genuinely rational course of action would push for broad policy only in specific, necessary circumstances. Humans have a natural tendency to solve our own problems, unless someone else is tasked with solving them. This gives variable results, of course, but it also gives results that are often more closely aligned with what a local community wants and needs. Broad policy lessens the variable results, but also raises inefficiency. There are tradeoffs here. Really feels like the rationalist position should account for those tradeoffs.
The term "rationalism" doesn't clarify the distinction between local collective decision-making and national collective decision-making. In each case (local and national), myriad actors, who have diverse endowment, beliefs, and motivations, interact in a context of institutional rules to make policy.
Collective decision-making involves several mechanisms among individuals; for example, arguing (persuasion), bargaining, voting, veto powers, side-payments (even corruption), outside options (potential exit), and so on.
Arnold raises empirical questions, which I would phrase as follows: Are there systematic differences in the quality of outcomes between local and national collective decisions across policy issues? Are there second-order mechanisms that tend to sort collective-decision problems efficiently between local and national jurisdictions? I agree with Arnold that the answers are No.
In this context, I would emphasize two checks on collective decisions: (a) rules to limit "rent-seeking" (insider capture), and (b) institutions and rules to ensure that exit options are available (competition).
Of course, a Catch-22 is that a polity needs a good constitution (a second-order mechanism) to help and assign jurisdiction of day-to-day collective decisions.
Interesting. It seems to me that with the Internet, local communities aren't going to be strong in the sense you mean regardless. People whose preferences differ from the community average are going to spin off into online communities and you won't have the sort of cultural consensus needed for localism to work well.
Re Hanania on woke stuff and civil rights law, that just can't be right as an explanation. Woke stuff first got bad (ca mid-late 2000s) in businesses where civil rights law has very little importance, like among authors and editors of genre and young adult fiction. An author is not going to be able to bring a civil rights suit against a publisher in practice, and yet there were de facto race, gender and other identity quotas in these fields by 2009, as well as massive speech policing via online mobs and boycotts.
Crime is almost exclusively a local problem although disrupting the supply chains that bring guns to local criminals would be helped by a national system of registration an regulation of their interstate commerce. The national War on Crime/Drugs was mostly a mistake.
Nimbyism is allowing concern for hyperlocal amenities to prevent city/region wide benefits of developments that raise property values.
NEPA is not well calibrated to leave regulation (or better Pigou taxation) of externalities having only local effects to state/local governments.
Climate change is a mismatch between to whom and when the benefits of carbon combustion occur and to whom and when there costs are borne.
Immigration though in principle a national problem (immigrates can settle wherever they want) would in practice's be better handled if cites and states that see the benefits of immigration being able to allow it and leave places that don't alone. The Ninetieth Century system (with the exception of the Chinese Exclusion Act) was better.
"Interstate commerce" in firearms is already highly regulated. Even the Giffords Law Center (https://giffords.org/lawcenter/gun-laws/policy-areas/background-checks/interstate-online-gun-sales/) admits on their web page (scroll down past the screeds and misinformation on so-called private transfers) that the only legal way to purchase a handgun as a non-resident of a state is to transfer it between two Federal Firearms License holders, one in the purchase state and one in your state of residence. Direct interstate long gun sales are subject to different Federal restrictions but are still often prohibited by state law.
What a great topic. This might be my favorite line.
"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."
I've long recognized that government aid pushes out other forms of assistance but I never connected it with loss of community. That's an important consideration. Government aid also becomes an expectation of the recipients, seen as a right, with accompanying negative attributes that are much smaller with gifts from others.
The best point made by a commenter (thus far), and I paraphrase. Government can only mimic rationality. But it can't be truly rational because it must assume away the pain and costs of those who are injured by its "rational" policy choices. By "assume away" I mean that if A gains $1000 and B loses $500 because of a policy change, the change is nevertheless said to be justified because there is a (mythical) social benefit of $500.
Constant dialog between you and the repredable contractor should get you both where you want to be apon completion of project. Use you mouths people....communicate don't litigate
A little follow-up to my previous comment, re: "rationalism" and collective decisions.
In what sense might collective decisions be rational? Economists usually discuss this question under the rubric, "social-choice theory." It turns out that collective decisions require special circumstances to satisfy intuitive criteria of coherence. This problem besets (a) process ("preference aggregation") and (b) outcome metrics ("social welfare").
Individual rationality is a more coherent normative concept than collective rationality. An individual is rational if she knows her motivations, bases her beliefs about facts and mechanisms on reasonably accessible evidence (and appreciates the limits of available evidence), and chooses a course the best means to try and accomplish her motivation(s). Inner clarity about motivations involves reckoning with interest (self-interest, group interest, altruism), passions (love, envy, anger, empathy, etc), and impartiality (principle, justice, etc), as well as clarity about one's risk-tolerance, desire to enjoy the present, and concern for the future. In other words, individual rationality can be complicated, and elusive due to inner opacity and strong feelings, but is a more coherent concept than collective rationality.
One of the strongest arguments for rationalism is the historical frequency with which local communities are in fact tyrannical, backward, and stifling. There are lots of good examples of this in Pieter Judson's history of the Habsburg Empire, for example: local peasants in the non-German-speaking areas the Habsburgs conquered often supported their centralizing, alien, foreign-language-imposing imperialism because it freed them from their feudal obligations to rapacious local lords.
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.
Small local builders put their customers through hell, also. I don't know anyone who bought a house as it was being built who had a good experience. But I don't think that bad experiences with buying homes is what makes people NIMBY.
I’m not making a commentary about local vs national builders. I have no clue who’s better.
I’m simply saying that there a lot of incentives in the industry for corner cutting and dishonesty that turn people off. I don’t think it’s THE reason for NIMBY, but I think it’s pretty relevant in my town and I’ve never seen people discuss it.
Maybe curtailing some of the worst practices in the industry might help. Just like controllling crime better would help.
At this point it is very difficult to tell which causes which. Nimby regulations mean that large amounts of resources go into simply getting permission to build a home or development, it also means that getting permission for one frequently means not getting permission for another, and finally speed becomes of the essence because the longer the project goes on the higher the chance a NIMBY lawsuit puts it on hold which is the worst case sceanrio. Local reputation doesn't matter to the builders because of this, but also they are continually cyclying through subcontractors and not holding their own employees because their next job might be a 2 hour commute. Subs get paid when the work is completed and so make more the faster they work, which leads to some bad incentives. I know a manager who runs large commercial projects and his outright statement is that in every major building there are bottles of urine in the walls where contractors pee, screw the cap on and drywall over them despite it being his (and his companies) policy to encourage real bathroom breaks.
It seems to me that “mastering the local regulatory bureaucracy” is way more important for most developer’s businesses than actual construction. If anything, all of the “rents” imposed in the land acquisition cost means that there is even more emphasis on making construction as cheap as possible.
Since there us often only one developer serving an attractive location there are many monopolistic aspects of home construction.
Anyway all of the above add up to “we build it our way and if you don’t like it we will sell to the next guy in line”
Great essay. Rationalism / utilitarianism would be in a more solid position if we could easily calculate the downstream effects of policy on culture. Since we can’t, most rationalists / utilitarians tend to underestimate or ignore cultural considerations. I understand your human interdependence essay series in part as a laudable attempt to patch this gap.
Maybe I'm not plugged into to rationalist community enough, why is broad-scale policy being explicitly coded as rationalist? Feels like a genuinely rational course of action would push for broad policy only in specific, necessary circumstances. Humans have a natural tendency to solve our own problems, unless someone else is tasked with solving them. This gives variable results, of course, but it also gives results that are often more closely aligned with what a local community wants and needs. Broad policy lessens the variable results, but also raises inefficiency. There are tradeoffs here. Really feels like the rationalist position should account for those tradeoffs.
The term "rationalism" doesn't clarify the distinction between local collective decision-making and national collective decision-making. In each case (local and national), myriad actors, who have diverse endowment, beliefs, and motivations, interact in a context of institutional rules to make policy.
Collective decision-making involves several mechanisms among individuals; for example, arguing (persuasion), bargaining, voting, veto powers, side-payments (even corruption), outside options (potential exit), and so on.
Arnold raises empirical questions, which I would phrase as follows: Are there systematic differences in the quality of outcomes between local and national collective decisions across policy issues? Are there second-order mechanisms that tend to sort collective-decision problems efficiently between local and national jurisdictions? I agree with Arnold that the answers are No.
In this context, I would emphasize two checks on collective decisions: (a) rules to limit "rent-seeking" (insider capture), and (b) institutions and rules to ensure that exit options are available (competition).
Of course, a Catch-22 is that a polity needs a good constitution (a second-order mechanism) to help and assign jurisdiction of day-to-day collective decisions.
Interesting. It seems to me that with the Internet, local communities aren't going to be strong in the sense you mean regardless. People whose preferences differ from the community average are going to spin off into online communities and you won't have the sort of cultural consensus needed for localism to work well.
Re Hanania on woke stuff and civil rights law, that just can't be right as an explanation. Woke stuff first got bad (ca mid-late 2000s) in businesses where civil rights law has very little importance, like among authors and editors of genre and young adult fiction. An author is not going to be able to bring a civil rights suit against a publisher in practice, and yet there were de facto race, gender and other identity quotas in these fields by 2009, as well as massive speech policing via online mobs and boycotts.
See the woke takeover in Sci-Fi, and the Sad Puppies partial backlash.
Slightly successful Authors are among the lowest paid of the "elite" - and seem to often be among the biggest virtue signallers.
Horses for courses.
Crime is almost exclusively a local problem although disrupting the supply chains that bring guns to local criminals would be helped by a national system of registration an regulation of their interstate commerce. The national War on Crime/Drugs was mostly a mistake.
Nimbyism is allowing concern for hyperlocal amenities to prevent city/region wide benefits of developments that raise property values.
NEPA is not well calibrated to leave regulation (or better Pigou taxation) of externalities having only local effects to state/local governments.
Climate change is a mismatch between to whom and when the benefits of carbon combustion occur and to whom and when there costs are borne.
Immigration though in principle a national problem (immigrates can settle wherever they want) would in practice's be better handled if cites and states that see the benefits of immigration being able to allow it and leave places that don't alone. The Ninetieth Century system (with the exception of the Chinese Exclusion Act) was better.
"Interstate commerce" in firearms is already highly regulated. Even the Giffords Law Center (https://giffords.org/lawcenter/gun-laws/policy-areas/background-checks/interstate-online-gun-sales/) admits on their web page (scroll down past the screeds and misinformation on so-called private transfers) that the only legal way to purchase a handgun as a non-resident of a state is to transfer it between two Federal Firearms License holders, one in the purchase state and one in your state of residence. Direct interstate long gun sales are subject to different Federal restrictions but are still often prohibited by state law.
Maybe I am wrong, but I understand that when police find a person carrying a firearm illegally, it is not easy to trace back it prevenance.
Arnold;
Glad you are wrestling with such challenging topics.
Keep wrestling.
Localities are cases where people have a great deal of power to block projects, but almost no power to do anything else. So that's what they do.
What a great topic. This might be my favorite line.
"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."
I've long recognized that government aid pushes out other forms of assistance but I never connected it with loss of community. That's an important consideration. Government aid also becomes an expectation of the recipients, seen as a right, with accompanying negative attributes that are much smaller with gifts from others.
The best point made by a commenter (thus far), and I paraphrase. Government can only mimic rationality. But it can't be truly rational because it must assume away the pain and costs of those who are injured by its "rational" policy choices. By "assume away" I mean that if A gains $1000 and B loses $500 because of a policy change, the change is nevertheless said to be justified because there is a (mythical) social benefit of $500.
Constant dialog between you and the repredable contractor should get you both where you want to be apon completion of project. Use you mouths people....communicate don't litigate
A little follow-up to my previous comment, re: "rationalism" and collective decisions.
In what sense might collective decisions be rational? Economists usually discuss this question under the rubric, "social-choice theory." It turns out that collective decisions require special circumstances to satisfy intuitive criteria of coherence. This problem besets (a) process ("preference aggregation") and (b) outcome metrics ("social welfare").
Individual rationality is a more coherent normative concept than collective rationality. An individual is rational if she knows her motivations, bases her beliefs about facts and mechanisms on reasonably accessible evidence (and appreciates the limits of available evidence), and chooses a course the best means to try and accomplish her motivation(s). Inner clarity about motivations involves reckoning with interest (self-interest, group interest, altruism), passions (love, envy, anger, empathy, etc), and impartiality (principle, justice, etc), as well as clarity about one's risk-tolerance, desire to enjoy the present, and concern for the future. In other words, individual rationality can be complicated, and elusive due to inner opacity and strong feelings, but is a more coherent concept than collective rationality.
One of the strongest arguments for rationalism is the historical frequency with which local communities are in fact tyrannical, backward, and stifling. There are lots of good examples of this in Pieter Judson's history of the Habsburg Empire, for example: local peasants in the non-German-speaking areas the Habsburgs conquered often supported their centralizing, alien, foreign-language-imposing imperialism because it freed them from their feudal obligations to rapacious local lords.
None of this is by accident.