Daniel Davies on Dan Wang; Nathan Witkin on elite radicalization; Lakshaya Jain on youth and political intensity; Kevin Erdmann's theory of everything going wrong
Does anybody think, or better know that, the findings about social media engagement are unique to social media? From my own experience with mass media I think you could replicate pretty much the same results from a study of engagement with newspaper stories and editorials, movies, tv shows, and music. That list of engagement drivers reads like a list of country song themes. The only significant difference I can see is that elites get to pick who generates engagement in the mass media while social media influencers are or can be somewhat more organic, though the elites would certainly like to control social media more
“Supreme Court ruling that cities could consider apartments to be nuisances”
It was actually common sense that ruled that past a certain population density, apartments are in fact a public nuisance. People decided that by voting with their feet and relocating to the suburbs from the crowded cities. And then, through a democratic and transparent process, the residents of those suburban communities decided to limit population density.
Don’t like it? Create your own master planned community with all the density that your heart desires and then let the populace decide voluntarily if they want to move there.
One suspects Mr. Erdmann doesn't actually live near poor people. Also he has the mental affliction that confuses "city" with "megalopolis". Anyone who feels 2,000,000= 200,000= 20,000= 2,000= 200 really ought to told "Your opinion doesn't matter ".
An urbanist forum I used to frequent in a former city, because our newspaper had died so it was one of the few places to get news of local developments, was full of eager market urbanists who lived in the most charming neighborhoods in town. Indeed neighborhoods denser than suburban areas - with a mix of grand old houses, bungalows (lots of those), and garage apartments or add-ons in back, lots of old trees in a city where newly planted trees in the asphalt were never going to become old trees, plenty of small garden apartment complexes and some duplexes and later 4-plexes and 8-plexes, some retail also mostly of the “charming” variety so you could say you had somewhere to walk to, a park with a pool … ride the bus a straight shot to the centrally located downtown or to the university, or could bike the same.
They had it pretty good in that boomtown.
And yet they felt compelled at every turn to put up photos of eg Taipei. Urbanist porn, it was to them.
They absolutely worshipped the idea of the mega city and like you say, seemed to have no sense of the logarithmic difference between that and where they lived.
All news of high rise building thrilled them, vacancy rates be damned.
All news that something people liked or valued, enough so that it got mentioned anyway, and seldom successfully as regarded getting to keep it, was going to be razed - anything suggesting that some folks, whether wisely or not in that instance, had an attachment to their town (“Boomers!” was their somewhat math-challenged descriptor for all such people) - made them orgasmic with glee.
Your comment brings to mind an interesting question. If a city such as San Francisco allowed denser housing, would the population increase to fill it or decrease because it became less desirable? I don't think we know the answer to that.
Let the voters of San Francisco decide for themselves how they want their city to develop as opposed to letting some economist that doesn’t live there decide. It just so happens that the voters have decided what they want, again and again and again. That’s the essence of self-government and devolution.
Btw - most residents of San Francisco are renters (65%) vs. homeowners (35%), so it’s not as simple as the oppressor homeowners outvoting the oppressed renters type narrative that some people like to express.
If I had my druthers, the residents of San Francisco would completely outsource their decision making to the EU or possibly Xi or Venezuela. Like really, why should it like only be the current residents of the city that get to decide on the city’s future? Let’s go global or bust.
I'm not sure what seems to have set you off. Your comment made me see the restrictions more favorably. I just thought it was an interesting what-if.
That said, your claim of majority rule has multiple weaknesses. First there's the tyranny or the majority. Second, there's the question of individual freedom and the limits to which voters (or governments more generally) can restrict individual freedom. I'm not saying either limit is being exceeding here, just that it's not nearly as simple as you framed it.
Property rights (or really, the bundle of rights we call property rights) have a long and interesting history as I’m sure you are well aware. There has never been an unlimited right to do whatever you want on your property if it impedes on the property rights of others. Historically, courts got to decide what constituted a nuisance under civil law. All that changed under Euclid v. Ambler (the case referenced by Erdmann) was that local cities got to clean up the legal mess known as nuisance law and establish order through the passage of development ordinances and zoning. Erdmann calls that a bad thing. I disagree as the historical development of the city of Euclid clearly demonstrates. The population grew significantly since the SCOTUS decision and is 60%+ black today. Link below.
And, there is nothing particularly controversial in that SCOTUS decision from a local police powers and nuisance perspective. For example, we don’t want iron smelting businesses located adjacent to residential housing for obvious reasons and democratic processes should decide that rather than unelected judges in civil cases.
52% of children in California are Hispanic. Mexico City is a fact, but at least in Texas, Hispanics show no particular disposition to live in high rise buildings. Now if they were to be displaced in California by Asian immigrants, or at least ruled by same, it might be a boon for much greater density.
I don’t think it makes much sense to ask these questions in connection with what Americans do or don’t find desirable. That won’t enter the equation.
I grew up in California, before the influx of Hispanics from Mexico and other countries south of the border. Of course, there was an 'indigenous' Hispanic population in California when I was growing up there (after all, the names of most of the major cities and many of the minor ones are Spanish, and the curriculum for the history of California focused on the Spanish missionaries), but as best I can recall, the percentage of students (elementary, jr. high and high school) of Japanese and Chinese descent was at least as high as those of Hispanic descent, and probably higher. We all lived in the 'burbs, i.e. SFHs, regardless of ethnicity. Of course, San Francisco is famous for its Chinatown (see Flower Drum Song), but it doesn't (or didn't) look anything like high-rise Hong Kong, where I have also been. As I have said previously, Chinese mega cities look dystopian to me, despite their gleaming modernity, and you couldn't pay me to live in NYC. I detest high-rises -- living in one makes you feel like a rat.
My guess....increase. People want to live there. Perceptions of density will change with folks habituating to higher densities.
More importantly, will job opportunities keep pace with the increased density? If there are jobs, density levels could result in Hong Kong-ification, if housing regulators allowed continually increasing density.
It’s all guessing, but some cities folks just wanna live there. New York, San Francisco, even Chicago… they’re all fucked up in all kinds of ways but people keep buying houses there so, who knows?
Where I live, the local government has decided to go all-in on increasing density by authorizing re-zoning and private construction of lots more condos and townhomes. At the same time, they have not authorized (i.e., funded) any more public transportation infrastructure (new lanes, or street conversion into major roads, or more buses and routes), and neither have they authorized public construction that would represent proportional expansions of low-spare-capacity public services, for example, the schools.
If you increase the population but not the capacity to deal with population, then you get all kinds of bad crowding and congestion problems. If your state isn't able to do it, that is lack of "state capacity" to increase capacity! That's why the sane and capable governments of East Asia try to run these things in proportion and in parallel.
People can complain about the NIMBYs all they want, but my neighbors who are NIMBYs were absolutely right many years ago when they founded the argument for their NIMBYism on the presumption that -of course- the local government would screw up a density-expansion in precisely this manner, and at least in that prediction they - and all the congestion-free time they bought for themselves in efforts to stop it from happening until now - have been absolutely vindicated.
This is why I've argued for a principle of urban planning I call "conservation of infrastructural adequacy". That would give builders lots more ease and freedom to build whatever they want, wherever they want it, in whatever quantity. It's just, they also have to build out public infrastructure or pay whatever it takes to increase the capacity to keep the level of congestion the same, otherwise, they are imposing a negative externality on the rest of the community.
See, when the YIMBY's look at bare construction costs for building a townhome on a plot of land, they argue that we can make housing so much cheaper! But if you had to charge enough money for that townhouse or apartment building or whatever to pay for it's share of additional roads, pipes, schools, etc., it wouldn't be so cheap at all, and my guess is that it would double the prices, at least.
These are great points, Handle. From an arm chair philosophical standpoint I am all-in YIMBY.
But I live in California, and I know that extensive “affordable housing” near my residence would absolutely destroy my standard of living. They wouldn’t build out the infrastructure needed, they wouldn’t police the undesirables, they wouldn’t run out the homeless junkies, they wouldn’t maintain educational standards in the schools, and so on.
Adding to my own comment with a different point, if people REALLY wanted affordable housing in California, they could start by zoning (in designated areas) for mobile home parks.
This is one of my major disappointments with Bryan Caplan's "Build, Baby, Build!" He just doesn't engage with the reality of at last some NIMBYism being not of the nature of a firm ideological or political position, but a contextually self-interested one given the current social situation, and which is a rational coping strategy to predictably bad government.
I agree with your point about needing infrastructure to match growing population and the second point that government is likely to screw it up. I can't say I agree with your suggestion that builders and developers pay for it, though they already pay for some of it such as storm runoff. Increasing the cost to builders will make housing more expensive, move construction to places with a lower infrastructure tax that might be otherwise "better," or both.
Oh...you mean development like we do it here in America, i.e., not a single look or consideration beyond the end of one's nose.
I spent my career in housing...building, managing, maintaining, rental...all of it. There is no planning in American city building. There is brute force, confused ideas, conflicting goals, etc. Urban planning in America has largely or completely been the domain of developers, with municipal "planners" mostly being instructed to figure out a plan that fits with the developers goals.
But that assumes people would want to live there instead of the suburbs if the character of SF residential neighborhoods changed. We don't know if that is a valid assumption.
Regarding the greater tendency of the Left to freeze out family and friends who disagree, another reason may be that the Left's pieties are poorly thought out, adopted for social acceptance, unrealistically aspirational, and incongruent with the sad reality of our fallible human nature. Hence, any discussion threatens to undermine them and leave the person unmoored.
Maybe the full list doesn't apply to the right but "poorly thought out" applies to most people on the right just as much as a similar number on the left.
I'm not sure I'm even comfortable imbuing either side with "thinking". It's more like mechanical cognition, folks line up a few gears to mesh that supports their existing bias, and that's as far as it goes.
Yep. I don't disagree except I said "most" because I believe there are some on each side who are pretty good at getting past their biases and think more clearly. But none of us are without our biases and blind spots.
It was the Big Builder himself, Robert Moses and his cronies, eagerly followed in succeeding decades by others across the country, who determined that whole neighborhoods were blighted, nuisances - so that he/ they could build the things he wanted and that they could make money from instead (baseball stadiums, bridges, freeways, concert halls, new apartment blocks).
The Big Builder - especially all his freeways - is surely a hero to the Abundance crowd. If that’s what you’re wanting, Abundance-style, you too will want to go searching for nuisance. That statute will serve you well.
Then when you have taken an apartment complex down and built a Target, you can say - see, in America we can still build things.
It's important to keep in mind that the Abundance authors don't really know what they're talking about. They're rhetoricians writing books, not builders that understand what it takes to get anything done....cheerleaders not understanding what the game is, who's playing or what team they're actually cheering for.
I think the Abundance authors do actually know what they're talking about. But they are constrained in the way they can craft their message. That goes both for the way they must speak to their intended, center-left audience, and also to avoid stirring up the leftist ostracization snipers hornet's nest.
So they are stuck between a rock and hard place, and they can't just come out and say what they know. The rock is the set of necessary and ameliorative reforms, and the hard place is the left's general rejection of those reforms (and the underlying arguments for them) as conservative-coded, so wrong and evil.
So they have to be kind of sneaky and cagey and vague about it. And, well, frankly, like a lot of amateurish attempts at Straussian writings in "an age of persecution", they can't pull it off without leaving out too many important details and thus looking kind of dumb. And so they have to rely on their promotors and reviewers to be aware of and sympathetic to their dilemma, and thus restrained from calling them out and giving them a get-out-of-standards-of-rigor-free card pass on it.
They are in the analogous position to Soviet or Chinese economists during the era of hard-Communism trying to advocate for clearly beneficial reforms, i.e., more "abundance", which, unfortunately for the state ideology, would necessarily rely on heresy to the orthodoxy, that is, movements in the direction of the whole capitalist-society infrastructure of private property and for-profit ownership of the means of production, individual freedom, markets and market-set prices, entrepreneurship, a government limited by rule of law and a court system that can be relied upon to protect these rights, and so forth.
Well, these brave souls both had to tread very lightly and carefully with their words, and they also had to be a little nakedly brazen in just straight-up asserting (i.e., lying) about whether something was a capitalist heresy or, on the other hand, if you really think about it, actually even more perfect Socialism. Salutary Hypocrisy. For example, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, i.e., lots of de facto capitalism, in one of the many flavors of an "economic-fascism-lite" version of mixed economy, to which pretty much all the major nations of the world converged a few decades ago.
In the Soviet context there were a number of important economists who navigated these treacherous waters, such as E. G. Liberman, who was behind many of the ideas in the Soviet Economic Reform of 1965, implemented shortly after Khrushchev's removal and replacement by the Brezhnev troika. Kosygin was actually primus inter pares initially, and he introduced the reforms, and was running the economy, which he hoped to loosen further. But he got effectively subordinated by Brezhnev after the Prague Spring and subsequent tightening.
Another historical example could be the topic of usury. It's pretty hard to get the benefits of capitalism without finance and the ability to charge interest on loans. It's also pretty hard for sovereigns and even the Church itself to borrow large sums when in a pinch unless they agree to pay the time value of the capital, which was, however, very clearly sinful. So, because they just couldn't come out and say that the prohibition on interest grounded in theology was probably a big mistake, many advocates of reform had to come up with rationalizations for exceptions or other clever circumventions in order to say that, while of course one cannot charge interest because it's usury which is a sin, there are some other non-sinning ways to, you know, um, compensate for lost profits and opportunity cost maybe.
As an example, the pre-Reformation Catholic Church tolerated "zinskauf" instruments, which were, in reality, perpetual bonds, i.e., debts with interest. But, because they were characterized as transferrable "annuities", the money was never 'lent', because one acquires an annuity by 'sale' instead of through a 'loan'. Clever! Martin Luther, echoing arguments made by Aquinas, railed against it in his Treatise on Usury. But perhaps ironically it would be the Northern Protestant societies which would then leapfrog the Southern Catholics and rapidly and substantially relax the old rules against loans for interest. Even then, they weren't so much saying they were repealing the prohibition on usury, but instead, keeping it, but, you know, providing a better interpretation of the prohibition based on the clear intent to avoid not all interest, silly, but only predatory abuses and excesses ... or ... something ... yadda yadda.
Look, in hindsight, and even putting aside the theological considerations, the arguments those people made at the time look pretty dumb in the same way Klein and Thompson's arguments are, shall we say, conspicuously incomplete. Same goes for Dan Wang in "Breakneck". But that's because they just couldn't come out and embrace heresy and argue against the prohibition of usury directly.
In general it seems today's Center Left is basically trying to achieve yesterday's Neoconservative program for more livable cities but trying to explain why it's not conservative and in fact even more orthodoxly leftist to implement those policies, if you really think about it.
I surely agree with you, but I partly agree with Kurt.
They are “constrained” *both* by their desire to appeal to their left-of-center audience (I disagree that they are targeting the center-left; imo they are targeting the “center of the left” whom they think they can win back away from the radicals but who today are mostly siding with the radicals) *and* by the fact that they don’t grok that most “building” occurs despite their leftist tendencies and not because of them.
And they are constrained by their mostly false, perhaps naive views that echo Obama’s/Warren’s “You didn’t build that”…
Certainly Klein based on all that he has written is an old-school progressive and not in fact a Josh Barro center-left type. He merely appears to be center-left because - exactly as Colin Wright’s cartoon shows so well - the Dem party has moved *so* far left in the last 20 years
"Wang cites neither Krugman nor Marshall." Thank you for citing Krugman, Marshall, and Wang. Citing others—and bringing attention to deserving writers—is one of your fortes.
"The mysteries of the trade become no mysteries; but are as it were in the air, and children learn many of them unconsciously." This is one of my biggest concerns: Lack of productivity in learning. And more importantly, lack of feedback about the productivity and quality of their learning.
Are people learning well? Are they practicing well? Too many children (and parents) seem distracted. This blog is distracting enough, but I'm not sure what to do about it. I'm tempted to ask Arnold to stop blogging, so I can better focus, but his posts are too good.
Marshall and Krugman were a couple millennia behind Guan Zhong (管仲, 720-645 BCE), who first cited the effects of agglomeration in cities while the Brits were living in mud holes.
Merchants and Business People (Throughout Imperial History)
This group understood the concept through practice, not theory. For them, cities were not philosophical concepts but venues for profit.
· The Salt and Iron Merchants: During the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), fortunes were made by merchants who operated in cities, controlling the trade of essential goods like salt and iron.
· Guilds (会馆 Huiguàn): From the Song Dynasty onwards, merchants from the same region or in the same trade formed guilds in major cities like Beijing, Suzhou, and Hankou. These guilds were a direct response to the power of agglomeration: they provided networking opportunities, settled disputes, set prices, and offered lodging and storage. Their very existence proves a sophisticated understanding that clustering in cities made business easier, safer, and more profitable.
Poets and Writers (Tang and Song Dynasties onwards)
Literary figures captured the social and cultural opportunities created by urban agglomeration.
· Descriptions of Chang'an (Tang Dynasty) and Bianjing (Song Dynasty): Writers like Liu Zongyuan (柳宗元) and Meng Yuanlao (孟元老) left vivid descriptions of the immense capital cities. They wrote of bustling markets that never slept, hundreds of different trades, entertainment districts with storytellers and actors, and restaurants serving cuisine from across the empire. Their writings romanticized the city as a place of excitement, cultural exchange, and possibility—a stark contrast to rural life.
The Scholar Who Best Articulated the Historical Pattern
While the understanding is ancient, a modern historian who brilliantly synthesized why Chinese cities were engines of opportunity was G. William Skinner (1925-2008), an American anthropologist and sinologist.
Although not Chinese himself, his work is essential to this discussion because he provided the theoretical framework that explained what the ancient Chinese planners and merchants intuitively knew. He proposed the "Spatial Model of Macroregions," arguing that:
· China was not a single monolithic economy but a collection of nine "macroregions."
· Each region had a core-periphery structure, with a central river system and a hierarchy of cities (standard market towns → larger towns → regional capitals).
· Economic opportunity, innovation, and culture were concentrated in these urban cores. People moved up the hierarchy of settlements to seek better opportunities, with the major city at the top offering the most.
So, who first understood?
· The earliest systematic thinkers were political economists like Guan Zhong in the 7th century BCE, who designed cities to maximize economic and military power through agglomeration.
· The most practical understanders were the merchants and guilds who built their livelihoods on the networks and markets that only dense cities could provide.
· The most vivid describers were poets and writers who chronicled the vibrant social and cultural opportunities of urban life.
The understanding wasn't a sudden discovery but a gradual, deep-seated recognition that was central to the development of Chinese civilization for millennia.
I just get a little perturbed when modern day...and to my mind...shallow thinking on the topic claims original status to ideas that are millennia old, and best understood by the folks that took practical advantage of those ideas. Modern academics should step back from themselves and take a wider view.
Sounds like I should spend more time learning about Chinese history. I only know the surface stuff—gunpowder, noodles, The Great Wall, WWII, Hong Kong, Communism, etc. Wasn’t taught in any of my classes. I probably know more than most Americans, but still a weak area for me.
Well, I'm glad and impressed you see the limits of our mutual educations; most folks don't. I never got anything either, except for the Mao disasters. None of us got anything.
For the last 15 years, I'm married to a Chinese (she's Chinese) history professor teaching at a large national university in Wuhan, I hang around with folks from the history departments of a dozen or so universities scattered around China and travel to historical sites, and...I'll get cocky...I've got a better than post doc education in Chinese history.
Now that I've seen the other side I can unequivocally say Western media narratives on China are decontextualized ahistorical nonsense, in addition to a remarkable number of blatant misrepresentations and lies.
“Now that I've seen the other side I can unequivocally say Western media narratives on China are decontextualized ahistorical nonsense“. Examples if you have time, please.
It is hard to change a person's mind about politics. I would add that it is hard to change a person's preferences for goods and services via manipulative advertising, as distinct from advertising that conveys useful information.
At the risk of seeming Vulcan (Spock), I believe that "influencing" and manipulative advertising are overrated. Consumer sovereignty is real.
There are two crucial caveats:
1. A person's attention is intrinsically scarce. Psychological tactics by influencers and by advertisers might play substantial roles in getting a person's attention.
2. Entrepreneurship can create new ideas and new goods and services — and so new beliefs and new desires and preferences.
I agree that influencing and advertising are overrated. On the other hand, I think it is wrong to think that people have fixed preferences for politics, and instead have more fixed trajectories. That is, there are grooves their thoughts follow based on their primary assumptions and view of the world, and they can be encouraged along those paths to more or less extreme versions of their current beliefs via following their herd or getting positive/negative feedback. The fundamental state is disequilibrium, as people just can't/don't think through the implications of their thoughts, and so can be moved one direction or another, but not with infinite degrees of freedom.
How curious that Erdmann attacks the 1961 New York City Zoning Resolution but doesn’t mention at all the 1916 New York City Zoning Resolution under which the growth he celebrates occurred and to which arguably is attributable. The 1916 New York Zoning Resolution, “the nation’s first comprehensive zoning ordinance” provided a relatively stable planning environment for both the city core and the at the time undeveloped areas in the outer areas that would play host to population growth up until the 1950s when available land became scarce. It would be amended many times, but basically set out the parameters under which the architects who designed the cityscape that we know today largely worked. Without it, it is hard to imagine what NYC would be like today or if it would even continue to exist.
There were of course previous efforts to improve livability (https://www.lillianwald.com/?page_id=403 ). These efforts culminated in a series of housing laws beginning with the New York State's Tenement House Act of 1867 which required were fire escapes and at least one outhouse for every twenty inhabitants, connected to the city sewers if possible. The Second Tenement Act of 1879 required that windows face fresh light and air (they could no longer face an interior hallway). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Tenement_House_Act ). Legislative efforts continued with enactment of the Tenement House Act of 1901 which imposed such demands as “requiring the addition of one toilet for every two families.”
The 1916 New York Zoning Resolution attempted to preserve street level access to sunshine through the setback: “created five height districts. Each was designated by a “multiple,” which established how high a building could rise straight up before it had to be set back from the street line in relationship to the width of the street (1, 1.25, 1.5, 2, 2.5). In other words, the multiple created an “envelope” into which the building had to fit. The idea was that as a building got taller, the setback ensured that some sunlight would be available on the street.” (https://buildingtheskyline.org/revisiting-1916-i/ )
By 1961 the frequently amended 1916 Zoning Resolution was regarded as inadquate, particularly since it predated the automobile. The New York City Zoning Resolution 1961:
“was created to suit the changing economy, an increasing population, and the growth of automobile use. The 1961 Zoning Resolution divided New York City into residential, commercial, and manufacturing areas. It introduced the concept of incentive zoning by adding a bonus of extra floor space to encourage developers of office buildings and apartment towers to incorporate public plazas into their projects. In the City’s business districts, it accommodated a new type of high-rise office building with large, open floors of a consistent size. Elsewhere in the City, the 1961 resolution dramatically reduced achievable residential densities, largely at the edges of the City.”
My browser AI explains the “dramatically reduced achievable residential densities” as:
“The 1961 New York City Zoning Resolution significantly reduced the theoretical maximum residential population compared to the 1916 codes. While the 1916 codes, under a fully built-out scenario, were estimated to allow a population of up to 55 million, the 1961 Resolution capped the theoretical maximum population at approximately 12 million, representing a major downzoning.
This cap was based on the adoption of the floor area ratio (FAR) as the primary tool to limit building bulk and density, particularly in the boroughs outside Manhattan.
The resolution's impact was such that, even with the city's population at 7.8 million in 1960, the new zoning rules were designed to prevent future population growth from reaching the levels projected under the old system.
The resolution's changes were intended to address concerns over overcrowding and the perceived "nightmare" of excessive population density.”
Given that Erdmann himself shows NYC’s 2020 population as 8.8 million up from 7.8 million in 1960, the 12 million theoretical cap is hardly in any danger of becoming an actual ceiling. In addition, the 1961 resolution has been frequently amended, including recently in 2024 provisions greatly explanding residential development opportunities. The many, many restrictions lifted include: “The prohibition on ‘rooming units’ (i.e., homes with shared kitchens or restrooms) has been eliminated, which is intended to create more affordable housing options for individuals and smaller households who might struggle to find suitable apartments in the current market.”
However it will be increasingly difficult to creditably attribute the ongoing population exodus to zoning.
One might also reasonably consider the role of other legislative acts upon population and housing density. For example, the Bard Act of 1956 was enacted to promote urban aesthetics and took effect in 1965 largely as a historical preservation measure most notably blocking housing development in Greenwich Village and Crown Heights. (https://www.nypap.org/preservation-history/bard-act/ )
Another is promotion of the concept of “environmental racisim.” In New York City, some have proposed that allowing certain identity groups to live near former manufacturing areas is problematic:
“Four primarily minority and low-income communities in New York City: Sunset Park and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, West Harlem in Manhattan, and the South Bronx in the late 1980s and 1990s. These neighborhoods share racial and poverty demographics, housing stock, and zoning designations, as well as social and political histories as centers for working-class waterfront employment…”
One wonders whether housing density increases in such neighborhoods would be welcomed or is even feasible.
One could go on. Families don’t want to live in places where the government is opposed to their children having access to the types of educational programs they desire. People might not be expected to rush to buy housing in areas promising ever more tax increases. And of course New York City, as with all the YIMBY jurisdictions, has rent control, the elephant in the housing discussion that is invariably ignored.
And yet when one looks across the river to Northern New Jersey, one sees a housing boom. Northern New Jersey has experienced a historic construction boom, outpacing New York City in housing construction. From 2010 to 2022, the five northern New Jersey counties (Hudson, Essex, Bergen, Union, and Passaic) issued permits for 224,570 housing units, which is nearly one-third of all permits issued in the tri-state area during that period and a 25% increase from the previous twelve years.
In contrast, New York City, issued 267,261 permits over the same period despite having double the population. Zoning in Northern New Jersey is governed by local municipal ordinances, as each of the state's 564 municipalities has the authority to adopt its own zoning, land use, and building laws within its boundaries. One might well consider, then, whether local zoning authority is being used as a scapegoat to cover a range of suboptimal policy decisions.
A modern example of local "process knowledge" is Taiwan, which became so dominant in the manufacture (and eventually the design) of video monitors or displays that it simply didn't much take place anywhere else.
1) “tensions between the more nativist and more business and tech-oriented factions of the Republican Party”
What a demented dichotomy. The business of America ain’t going to be business for long if we continue on the Reagan-urged path of immigrant-driven population growth uber alles (nearly all of which since 1980 has been sub/urban, confined to where the bennies are).
2) So … NYC is not dense enough? Or NYC should not be constrained by physical geography and should instead take advantage in some fashion of spacetime being non-Euclidean? Or NYC should say to hell with the business wing of whatever and appropriate by force various under-used buildings and fill them with “refugees”?
“I suspect two reasons for this tendency on the young left. First, young people are more likely to take their politics from social media. Second, young people on the left are more likely to be female, and the female approach to conflict within groups is to exclude rather than confront or tolerate.”
While I don’t doubt that both of the reason AK cites are contributory, I doubt they are as explanatory as he suggests.
I would be willing to bet that a bigger explanatory factor is being young and college miseducated. It is that group who are the most radical, yet I’ve seen little evidence that they use social media more than the non-college young.
And while I do believe it is correct that more young females proportionally are leftists now, said female approach to conflict is neither new nor unique to only the young.
In fact, while less confident, I’d be willing to bet that simply being left-wing (I.e. a Mamdani/AOC/Bernie fan) alone is more predictive and explanatory than use of social media for politics, or being young female, or even both.
And while which direction the causation runs re: social media extremism and political preference will be hard to ascertain, I stand by the claim that political extremism in general, and excluding friends or family based on it in particular, is far less a function of said social media than of simply how leftist partisan one is.
To be fair, I never cite a source for 'embodied knowledge' or 'tacit knowledge' or 'process knowledge.' We usually make a nod to Kuhn for paradigms, but I'm not sure why we give him that somewhat unique honor. I'd expect a scholar in a scholarly work to trace back the concepts more thoroughly than someone who is using a concept for practical purposes.
Re. Social Media, what if small, disagreeable and loud is the everything theory of social organization? Re. cities, I wonder what else happened around 1960?
The process that Daniel Davies and his progenitor Marshal imagine is "British" is another conceit by ill informed individuals.
The concept that cities are hubs of opportunity was deeply understood by several key groups in ancient China:
Philosophers and Political Strategists during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods, 770-221 BCE were way ahead of the Brits, who were still living in mud holes.
This was the foundational period where the purpose and power of cities were first systematically articulated.
· Guan Zhong (管仲, 720-645 BCE): As Chancellor of the State of Qi, he is arguably the earliest and most influential thinker on this subject. He didn't just understand that cities created opportunity; he actively designed them to do so. His policies, recorded in the text Guanzi, promoted:
· Specialized Commercial Districts: He organized the capital city, Linzi, into specific districts for craftsmen, merchants, and scholars. This agglomeration allowed for skill-sharing, competition, and efficient markets.
· State Investment in Infrastructure: He built canals, roads, and marketplaces to facilitate trade and attract people.
· Consumption-Driven Economy: He famously encouraged luxury consumption, arguing that it created demand and jobs for cooks, carriage-makers, weavers, and other artisans. His idea was that a wealthy elite spending money in the city would circulate wealth and create opportunities for the poor.
· His core belief was that a prosperous, populous city was the foundation of a powerful state. People would flock to the city for economic opportunity, and the state would, in turn, become richer and stronger.
I could continue to list Chinese philosophers and strategists through 2 millennia citing the benefits of urbanization and the agglomeration effects of urban density. I believe a major problem with Western "thinkers" is they imagine they thought of this stuff. Danny D needs to get with the program.
Does anybody think, or better know that, the findings about social media engagement are unique to social media? From my own experience with mass media I think you could replicate pretty much the same results from a study of engagement with newspaper stories and editorials, movies, tv shows, and music. That list of engagement drivers reads like a list of country song themes. The only significant difference I can see is that elites get to pick who generates engagement in the mass media while social media influencers are or can be somewhat more organic, though the elites would certainly like to control social media more
“Supreme Court ruling that cities could consider apartments to be nuisances”
It was actually common sense that ruled that past a certain population density, apartments are in fact a public nuisance. People decided that by voting with their feet and relocating to the suburbs from the crowded cities. And then, through a democratic and transparent process, the residents of those suburban communities decided to limit population density.
Don’t like it? Create your own master planned community with all the density that your heart desires and then let the populace decide voluntarily if they want to move there.
One suspects Mr. Erdmann doesn't actually live near poor people. Also he has the mental affliction that confuses "city" with "megalopolis". Anyone who feels 2,000,000= 200,000= 20,000= 2,000= 200 really ought to told "Your opinion doesn't matter ".
An urbanist forum I used to frequent in a former city, because our newspaper had died so it was one of the few places to get news of local developments, was full of eager market urbanists who lived in the most charming neighborhoods in town. Indeed neighborhoods denser than suburban areas - with a mix of grand old houses, bungalows (lots of those), and garage apartments or add-ons in back, lots of old trees in a city where newly planted trees in the asphalt were never going to become old trees, plenty of small garden apartment complexes and some duplexes and later 4-plexes and 8-plexes, some retail also mostly of the “charming” variety so you could say you had somewhere to walk to, a park with a pool … ride the bus a straight shot to the centrally located downtown or to the university, or could bike the same.
They had it pretty good in that boomtown.
And yet they felt compelled at every turn to put up photos of eg Taipei. Urbanist porn, it was to them.
They absolutely worshipped the idea of the mega city and like you say, seemed to have no sense of the logarithmic difference between that and where they lived.
All news of high rise building thrilled them, vacancy rates be damned.
All news that something people liked or valued, enough so that it got mentioned anyway, and seldom successfully as regarded getting to keep it, was going to be razed - anything suggesting that some folks, whether wisely or not in that instance, had an attachment to their town (“Boomers!” was their somewhat math-challenged descriptor for all such people) - made them orgasmic with glee.
Your comment brings to mind an interesting question. If a city such as San Francisco allowed denser housing, would the population increase to fill it or decrease because it became less desirable? I don't think we know the answer to that.
Let the voters of San Francisco decide for themselves how they want their city to develop as opposed to letting some economist that doesn’t live there decide. It just so happens that the voters have decided what they want, again and again and again. That’s the essence of self-government and devolution.
Btw - most residents of San Francisco are renters (65%) vs. homeowners (35%), so it’s not as simple as the oppressor homeowners outvoting the oppressed renters type narrative that some people like to express.
Why should it be the current residents of SF who get to decide? Why not the state govt or the Federal govt?
If I had my druthers, the residents of San Francisco would completely outsource their decision making to the EU or possibly Xi or Venezuela. Like really, why should it like only be the current residents of the city that get to decide on the city’s future? Let’s go global or bust.
I'm not sure what seems to have set you off. Your comment made me see the restrictions more favorably. I just thought it was an interesting what-if.
That said, your claim of majority rule has multiple weaknesses. First there's the tyranny or the majority. Second, there's the question of individual freedom and the limits to which voters (or governments more generally) can restrict individual freedom. I'm not saying either limit is being exceeding here, just that it's not nearly as simple as you framed it.
Property rights (or really, the bundle of rights we call property rights) have a long and interesting history as I’m sure you are well aware. There has never been an unlimited right to do whatever you want on your property if it impedes on the property rights of others. Historically, courts got to decide what constituted a nuisance under civil law. All that changed under Euclid v. Ambler (the case referenced by Erdmann) was that local cities got to clean up the legal mess known as nuisance law and establish order through the passage of development ordinances and zoning. Erdmann calls that a bad thing. I disagree as the historical development of the city of Euclid clearly demonstrates. The population grew significantly since the SCOTUS decision and is 60%+ black today. Link below.
And, there is nothing particularly controversial in that SCOTUS decision from a local police powers and nuisance perspective. For example, we don’t want iron smelting businesses located adjacent to residential housing for obvious reasons and democratic processes should decide that rather than unelected judges in civil cases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid,_Ohio
52% of children in California are Hispanic. Mexico City is a fact, but at least in Texas, Hispanics show no particular disposition to live in high rise buildings. Now if they were to be displaced in California by Asian immigrants, or at least ruled by same, it might be a boon for much greater density.
I don’t think it makes much sense to ask these questions in connection with what Americans do or don’t find desirable. That won’t enter the equation.
I grew up in California, before the influx of Hispanics from Mexico and other countries south of the border. Of course, there was an 'indigenous' Hispanic population in California when I was growing up there (after all, the names of most of the major cities and many of the minor ones are Spanish, and the curriculum for the history of California focused on the Spanish missionaries), but as best I can recall, the percentage of students (elementary, jr. high and high school) of Japanese and Chinese descent was at least as high as those of Hispanic descent, and probably higher. We all lived in the 'burbs, i.e. SFHs, regardless of ethnicity. Of course, San Francisco is famous for its Chinatown (see Flower Drum Song), but it doesn't (or didn't) look anything like high-rise Hong Kong, where I have also been. As I have said previously, Chinese mega cities look dystopian to me, despite their gleaming modernity, and you couldn't pay me to live in NYC. I detest high-rises -- living in one makes you feel like a rat.
My guess....increase. People want to live there. Perceptions of density will change with folks habituating to higher densities.
More importantly, will job opportunities keep pace with the increased density? If there are jobs, density levels could result in Hong Kong-ification, if housing regulators allowed continually increasing density.
Pre-COVID and the lockdowns I would 1000% agree with you, and have been willing to bet large dollars at favorable odds on the answer.
Post lockdowns and crime sprees, I still agree with you re: SF population if more housing was built, but I say so with far less certainty.
It’s all guessing, but some cities folks just wanna live there. New York, San Francisco, even Chicago… they’re all fucked up in all kinds of ways but people keep buying houses there so, who knows?
Where I live, the local government has decided to go all-in on increasing density by authorizing re-zoning and private construction of lots more condos and townhomes. At the same time, they have not authorized (i.e., funded) any more public transportation infrastructure (new lanes, or street conversion into major roads, or more buses and routes), and neither have they authorized public construction that would represent proportional expansions of low-spare-capacity public services, for example, the schools.
If you increase the population but not the capacity to deal with population, then you get all kinds of bad crowding and congestion problems. If your state isn't able to do it, that is lack of "state capacity" to increase capacity! That's why the sane and capable governments of East Asia try to run these things in proportion and in parallel.
People can complain about the NIMBYs all they want, but my neighbors who are NIMBYs were absolutely right many years ago when they founded the argument for their NIMBYism on the presumption that -of course- the local government would screw up a density-expansion in precisely this manner, and at least in that prediction they - and all the congestion-free time they bought for themselves in efforts to stop it from happening until now - have been absolutely vindicated.
This is why I've argued for a principle of urban planning I call "conservation of infrastructural adequacy". That would give builders lots more ease and freedom to build whatever they want, wherever they want it, in whatever quantity. It's just, they also have to build out public infrastructure or pay whatever it takes to increase the capacity to keep the level of congestion the same, otherwise, they are imposing a negative externality on the rest of the community.
See, when the YIMBY's look at bare construction costs for building a townhome on a plot of land, they argue that we can make housing so much cheaper! But if you had to charge enough money for that townhouse or apartment building or whatever to pay for it's share of additional roads, pipes, schools, etc., it wouldn't be so cheap at all, and my guess is that it would double the prices, at least.
These are great points, Handle. From an arm chair philosophical standpoint I am all-in YIMBY.
But I live in California, and I know that extensive “affordable housing” near my residence would absolutely destroy my standard of living. They wouldn’t build out the infrastructure needed, they wouldn’t police the undesirables, they wouldn’t run out the homeless junkies, they wouldn’t maintain educational standards in the schools, and so on.
Thus NIMBY.
Adding to my own comment with a different point, if people REALLY wanted affordable housing in California, they could start by zoning (in designated areas) for mobile home parks.
This is one of my major disappointments with Bryan Caplan's "Build, Baby, Build!" He just doesn't engage with the reality of at last some NIMBYism being not of the nature of a firm ideological or political position, but a contextually self-interested one given the current social situation, and which is a rational coping strategy to predictably bad government.
I agree with your point about needing infrastructure to match growing population and the second point that government is likely to screw it up. I can't say I agree with your suggestion that builders and developers pay for it, though they already pay for some of it such as storm runoff. Increasing the cost to builders will make housing more expensive, move construction to places with a lower infrastructure tax that might be otherwise "better," or both.
Oh...you mean development like we do it here in America, i.e., not a single look or consideration beyond the end of one's nose.
I spent my career in housing...building, managing, maintaining, rental...all of it. There is no planning in American city building. There is brute force, confused ideas, conflicting goals, etc. Urban planning in America has largely or completely been the domain of developers, with municipal "planners" mostly being instructed to figure out a plan that fits with the developers goals.
But that assumes people would want to live there instead of the suburbs if the character of SF residential neighborhoods changed. We don't know if that is a valid assumption.
I said it was a guess.
Regarding the greater tendency of the Left to freeze out family and friends who disagree, another reason may be that the Left's pieties are poorly thought out, adopted for social acceptance, unrealistically aspirational, and incongruent with the sad reality of our fallible human nature. Hence, any discussion threatens to undermine them and leave the person unmoored.
Maybe the full list doesn't apply to the right but "poorly thought out" applies to most people on the right just as much as a similar number on the left.
I'm not sure I'm even comfortable imbuing either side with "thinking". It's more like mechanical cognition, folks line up a few gears to mesh that supports their existing bias, and that's as far as it goes.
Yep. I don't disagree except I said "most" because I believe there are some on each side who are pretty good at getting past their biases and think more clearly. But none of us are without our biases and blind spots.
Yeah, generalizations are clumsy.
Usually… 😏
Ha!
Urbanists and their weird delusions.
It was the Big Builder himself, Robert Moses and his cronies, eagerly followed in succeeding decades by others across the country, who determined that whole neighborhoods were blighted, nuisances - so that he/ they could build the things he wanted and that they could make money from instead (baseball stadiums, bridges, freeways, concert halls, new apartment blocks).
The Big Builder - especially all his freeways - is surely a hero to the Abundance crowd. If that’s what you’re wanting, Abundance-style, you too will want to go searching for nuisance. That statute will serve you well.
Then when you have taken an apartment complex down and built a Target, you can say - see, in America we can still build things.
It's important to keep in mind that the Abundance authors don't really know what they're talking about. They're rhetoricians writing books, not builders that understand what it takes to get anything done....cheerleaders not understanding what the game is, who's playing or what team they're actually cheering for.
I think the Abundance authors do actually know what they're talking about. But they are constrained in the way they can craft their message. That goes both for the way they must speak to their intended, center-left audience, and also to avoid stirring up the leftist ostracization snipers hornet's nest.
So they are stuck between a rock and hard place, and they can't just come out and say what they know. The rock is the set of necessary and ameliorative reforms, and the hard place is the left's general rejection of those reforms (and the underlying arguments for them) as conservative-coded, so wrong and evil.
So they have to be kind of sneaky and cagey and vague about it. And, well, frankly, like a lot of amateurish attempts at Straussian writings in "an age of persecution", they can't pull it off without leaving out too many important details and thus looking kind of dumb. And so they have to rely on their promotors and reviewers to be aware of and sympathetic to their dilemma, and thus restrained from calling them out and giving them a get-out-of-standards-of-rigor-free card pass on it.
They are in the analogous position to Soviet or Chinese economists during the era of hard-Communism trying to advocate for clearly beneficial reforms, i.e., more "abundance", which, unfortunately for the state ideology, would necessarily rely on heresy to the orthodoxy, that is, movements in the direction of the whole capitalist-society infrastructure of private property and for-profit ownership of the means of production, individual freedom, markets and market-set prices, entrepreneurship, a government limited by rule of law and a court system that can be relied upon to protect these rights, and so forth.
Well, these brave souls both had to tread very lightly and carefully with their words, and they also had to be a little nakedly brazen in just straight-up asserting (i.e., lying) about whether something was a capitalist heresy or, on the other hand, if you really think about it, actually even more perfect Socialism. Salutary Hypocrisy. For example, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, i.e., lots of de facto capitalism, in one of the many flavors of an "economic-fascism-lite" version of mixed economy, to which pretty much all the major nations of the world converged a few decades ago.
In the Soviet context there were a number of important economists who navigated these treacherous waters, such as E. G. Liberman, who was behind many of the ideas in the Soviet Economic Reform of 1965, implemented shortly after Khrushchev's removal and replacement by the Brezhnev troika. Kosygin was actually primus inter pares initially, and he introduced the reforms, and was running the economy, which he hoped to loosen further. But he got effectively subordinated by Brezhnev after the Prague Spring and subsequent tightening.
Another historical example could be the topic of usury. It's pretty hard to get the benefits of capitalism without finance and the ability to charge interest on loans. It's also pretty hard for sovereigns and even the Church itself to borrow large sums when in a pinch unless they agree to pay the time value of the capital, which was, however, very clearly sinful. So, because they just couldn't come out and say that the prohibition on interest grounded in theology was probably a big mistake, many advocates of reform had to come up with rationalizations for exceptions or other clever circumventions in order to say that, while of course one cannot charge interest because it's usury which is a sin, there are some other non-sinning ways to, you know, um, compensate for lost profits and opportunity cost maybe.
As an example, the pre-Reformation Catholic Church tolerated "zinskauf" instruments, which were, in reality, perpetual bonds, i.e., debts with interest. But, because they were characterized as transferrable "annuities", the money was never 'lent', because one acquires an annuity by 'sale' instead of through a 'loan'. Clever! Martin Luther, echoing arguments made by Aquinas, railed against it in his Treatise on Usury. But perhaps ironically it would be the Northern Protestant societies which would then leapfrog the Southern Catholics and rapidly and substantially relax the old rules against loans for interest. Even then, they weren't so much saying they were repealing the prohibition on usury, but instead, keeping it, but, you know, providing a better interpretation of the prohibition based on the clear intent to avoid not all interest, silly, but only predatory abuses and excesses ... or ... something ... yadda yadda.
Look, in hindsight, and even putting aside the theological considerations, the arguments those people made at the time look pretty dumb in the same way Klein and Thompson's arguments are, shall we say, conspicuously incomplete. Same goes for Dan Wang in "Breakneck". But that's because they just couldn't come out and embrace heresy and argue against the prohibition of usury directly.
In general it seems today's Center Left is basically trying to achieve yesterday's Neoconservative program for more livable cities but trying to explain why it's not conservative and in fact even more orthodoxly leftist to implement those policies, if you really think about it.
I surely agree with you, but I partly agree with Kurt.
They are “constrained” *both* by their desire to appeal to their left-of-center audience (I disagree that they are targeting the center-left; imo they are targeting the “center of the left” whom they think they can win back away from the radicals but who today are mostly siding with the radicals) *and* by the fact that they don’t grok that most “building” occurs despite their leftist tendencies and not because of them.
And they are constrained by their mostly false, perhaps naive views that echo Obama’s/Warren’s “You didn’t build that”…
Certainly Klein based on all that he has written is an old-school progressive and not in fact a Josh Barro center-left type. He merely appears to be center-left because - exactly as Colin Wright’s cartoon shows so well - the Dem party has moved *so* far left in the last 20 years
https://substack.com/@andyg2/note/c-150561904
"Wang cites neither Krugman nor Marshall." Thank you for citing Krugman, Marshall, and Wang. Citing others—and bringing attention to deserving writers—is one of your fortes.
"The mysteries of the trade become no mysteries; but are as it were in the air, and children learn many of them unconsciously." This is one of my biggest concerns: Lack of productivity in learning. And more importantly, lack of feedback about the productivity and quality of their learning.
Are people learning well? Are they practicing well? Too many children (and parents) seem distracted. This blog is distracting enough, but I'm not sure what to do about it. I'm tempted to ask Arnold to stop blogging, so I can better focus, but his posts are too good.
Marshall and Krugman were a couple millennia behind Guan Zhong (管仲, 720-645 BCE), who first cited the effects of agglomeration in cities while the Brits were living in mud holes.
This is outside my area of expertise, but I’m glad you brought Mr. Zhong to our attention. Let me check with someone who might know more about this:
https://substack.com/profile/39148689-scott-gibb/note/c-153395672
There's always more....
Merchants and Business People (Throughout Imperial History)
This group understood the concept through practice, not theory. For them, cities were not philosophical concepts but venues for profit.
· The Salt and Iron Merchants: During the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), fortunes were made by merchants who operated in cities, controlling the trade of essential goods like salt and iron.
· Guilds (会馆 Huiguàn): From the Song Dynasty onwards, merchants from the same region or in the same trade formed guilds in major cities like Beijing, Suzhou, and Hankou. These guilds were a direct response to the power of agglomeration: they provided networking opportunities, settled disputes, set prices, and offered lodging and storage. Their very existence proves a sophisticated understanding that clustering in cities made business easier, safer, and more profitable.
Poets and Writers (Tang and Song Dynasties onwards)
Literary figures captured the social and cultural opportunities created by urban agglomeration.
· Descriptions of Chang'an (Tang Dynasty) and Bianjing (Song Dynasty): Writers like Liu Zongyuan (柳宗元) and Meng Yuanlao (孟元老) left vivid descriptions of the immense capital cities. They wrote of bustling markets that never slept, hundreds of different trades, entertainment districts with storytellers and actors, and restaurants serving cuisine from across the empire. Their writings romanticized the city as a place of excitement, cultural exchange, and possibility—a stark contrast to rural life.
The Scholar Who Best Articulated the Historical Pattern
While the understanding is ancient, a modern historian who brilliantly synthesized why Chinese cities were engines of opportunity was G. William Skinner (1925-2008), an American anthropologist and sinologist.
Although not Chinese himself, his work is essential to this discussion because he provided the theoretical framework that explained what the ancient Chinese planners and merchants intuitively knew. He proposed the "Spatial Model of Macroregions," arguing that:
· China was not a single monolithic economy but a collection of nine "macroregions."
· Each region had a core-periphery structure, with a central river system and a hierarchy of cities (standard market towns → larger towns → regional capitals).
· Economic opportunity, innovation, and culture were concentrated in these urban cores. People moved up the hierarchy of settlements to seek better opportunities, with the major city at the top offering the most.
So, who first understood?
· The earliest systematic thinkers were political economists like Guan Zhong in the 7th century BCE, who designed cities to maximize economic and military power through agglomeration.
· The most practical understanders were the merchants and guilds who built their livelihoods on the networks and markets that only dense cities could provide.
· The most vivid describers were poets and writers who chronicled the vibrant social and cultural opportunities of urban life.
The understanding wasn't a sudden discovery but a gradual, deep-seated recognition that was central to the development of Chinese civilization for millennia.
I just get a little perturbed when modern day...and to my mind...shallow thinking on the topic claims original status to ideas that are millennia old, and best understood by the folks that took practical advantage of those ideas. Modern academics should step back from themselves and take a wider view.
Sounds like I should spend more time learning about Chinese history. I only know the surface stuff—gunpowder, noodles, The Great Wall, WWII, Hong Kong, Communism, etc. Wasn’t taught in any of my classes. I probably know more than most Americans, but still a weak area for me.
Well, I'm glad and impressed you see the limits of our mutual educations; most folks don't. I never got anything either, except for the Mao disasters. None of us got anything.
For the last 15 years, I'm married to a Chinese (she's Chinese) history professor teaching at a large national university in Wuhan, I hang around with folks from the history departments of a dozen or so universities scattered around China and travel to historical sites, and...I'll get cocky...I've got a better than post doc education in Chinese history.
Now that I've seen the other side I can unequivocally say Western media narratives on China are decontextualized ahistorical nonsense, in addition to a remarkable number of blatant misrepresentations and lies.
“Now that I've seen the other side I can unequivocally say Western media narratives on China are decontextualized ahistorical nonsense“. Examples if you have time, please.
Re: Influencers.
It is hard to change a person's mind about politics. I would add that it is hard to change a person's preferences for goods and services via manipulative advertising, as distinct from advertising that conveys useful information.
At the risk of seeming Vulcan (Spock), I believe that "influencing" and manipulative advertising are overrated. Consumer sovereignty is real.
There are two crucial caveats:
1. A person's attention is intrinsically scarce. Psychological tactics by influencers and by advertisers might play substantial roles in getting a person's attention.
2. Entrepreneurship can create new ideas and new goods and services — and so new beliefs and new desires and preferences.
I agree that influencing and advertising are overrated. On the other hand, I think it is wrong to think that people have fixed preferences for politics, and instead have more fixed trajectories. That is, there are grooves their thoughts follow based on their primary assumptions and view of the world, and they can be encouraged along those paths to more or less extreme versions of their current beliefs via following their herd or getting positive/negative feedback. The fundamental state is disequilibrium, as people just can't/don't think through the implications of their thoughts, and so can be moved one direction or another, but not with infinite degrees of freedom.
Makes sense.
How curious that Erdmann attacks the 1961 New York City Zoning Resolution but doesn’t mention at all the 1916 New York City Zoning Resolution under which the growth he celebrates occurred and to which arguably is attributable. The 1916 New York Zoning Resolution, “the nation’s first comprehensive zoning ordinance” provided a relatively stable planning environment for both the city core and the at the time undeveloped areas in the outer areas that would play host to population growth up until the 1950s when available land became scarce. It would be amended many times, but basically set out the parameters under which the architects who designed the cityscape that we know today largely worked. Without it, it is hard to imagine what NYC would be like today or if it would even continue to exist.
There were of course previous efforts to improve livability (https://www.lillianwald.com/?page_id=403 ). These efforts culminated in a series of housing laws beginning with the New York State's Tenement House Act of 1867 which required were fire escapes and at least one outhouse for every twenty inhabitants, connected to the city sewers if possible. The Second Tenement Act of 1879 required that windows face fresh light and air (they could no longer face an interior hallway). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Tenement_House_Act ). Legislative efforts continued with enactment of the Tenement House Act of 1901 which imposed such demands as “requiring the addition of one toilet for every two families.”
( https://www.villagepreservation.org/2016/04/11/tenement-house-act-of-1901/ ) Yet somehow, despite these restrictive measures, the city population actually continued to grow for decades.
The 1916 New York Zoning Resolution attempted to preserve street level access to sunshine through the setback: “created five height districts. Each was designated by a “multiple,” which established how high a building could rise straight up before it had to be set back from the street line in relationship to the width of the street (1, 1.25, 1.5, 2, 2.5). In other words, the multiple created an “envelope” into which the building had to fit. The idea was that as a building got taller, the setback ensured that some sunlight would be available on the street.” (https://buildingtheskyline.org/revisiting-1916-i/ )
By 1961 the frequently amended 1916 Zoning Resolution was regarded as inadquate, particularly since it predated the automobile. The New York City Zoning Resolution 1961:
“was created to suit the changing economy, an increasing population, and the growth of automobile use. The 1961 Zoning Resolution divided New York City into residential, commercial, and manufacturing areas. It introduced the concept of incentive zoning by adding a bonus of extra floor space to encourage developers of office buildings and apartment towers to incorporate public plazas into their projects. In the City’s business districts, it accommodated a new type of high-rise office building with large, open floors of a consistent size. Elsewhere in the City, the 1961 resolution dramatically reduced achievable residential densities, largely at the edges of the City.”
(https://www.nypap.org/preservation-history/1961-new-york-city-zoning-resolution/ )
My browser AI explains the “dramatically reduced achievable residential densities” as:
“The 1961 New York City Zoning Resolution significantly reduced the theoretical maximum residential population compared to the 1916 codes. While the 1916 codes, under a fully built-out scenario, were estimated to allow a population of up to 55 million, the 1961 Resolution capped the theoretical maximum population at approximately 12 million, representing a major downzoning.
This cap was based on the adoption of the floor area ratio (FAR) as the primary tool to limit building bulk and density, particularly in the boroughs outside Manhattan.
The resolution's impact was such that, even with the city's population at 7.8 million in 1960, the new zoning rules were designed to prevent future population growth from reaching the levels projected under the old system.
The resolution's changes were intended to address concerns over overcrowding and the perceived "nightmare" of excessive population density.”
Given that Erdmann himself shows NYC’s 2020 population as 8.8 million up from 7.8 million in 1960, the 12 million theoretical cap is hardly in any danger of becoming an actual ceiling. In addition, the 1961 resolution has been frequently amended, including recently in 2024 provisions greatly explanding residential development opportunities. The many, many restrictions lifted include: “The prohibition on ‘rooming units’ (i.e., homes with shared kitchens or restrooms) has been eliminated, which is intended to create more affordable housing options for individuals and smaller households who might struggle to find suitable apartments in the current market.”
https://www.gtlaw.com/en/insights/2025/1/nyc-zoning-updates-city-of-yes-reshapes-housing-development-rules
So a revival of tenement housing? We will of course observe future trends in population density but somehow these changes don’t seem to provide much incentive for residents to stick around, and the exodus will likely continue (https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/slowdown-in-outflow-but-no-robust-rebound-in-latest-ny-population-estimates/ )
However it will be increasingly difficult to creditably attribute the ongoing population exodus to zoning.
One might also reasonably consider the role of other legislative acts upon population and housing density. For example, the Bard Act of 1956 was enacted to promote urban aesthetics and took effect in 1965 largely as a historical preservation measure most notably blocking housing development in Greenwich Village and Crown Heights. (https://www.nypap.org/preservation-history/bard-act/ )
Another is promotion of the concept of “environmental racisim.” In New York City, some have proposed that allowing certain identity groups to live near former manufacturing areas is problematic:
“Four primarily minority and low-income communities in New York City: Sunset Park and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, West Harlem in Manhattan, and the South Bronx in the late 1980s and 1990s. These neighborhoods share racial and poverty demographics, housing stock, and zoning designations, as well as social and political histories as centers for working-class waterfront employment…”
(https://environmentalracism.sites.umassd.edu/history-foundation/ )
One wonders whether housing density increases in such neighborhoods would be welcomed or is even feasible.
One could go on. Families don’t want to live in places where the government is opposed to their children having access to the types of educational programs they desire. People might not be expected to rush to buy housing in areas promising ever more tax increases. And of course New York City, as with all the YIMBY jurisdictions, has rent control, the elephant in the housing discussion that is invariably ignored.
And yet when one looks across the river to Northern New Jersey, one sees a housing boom. Northern New Jersey has experienced a historic construction boom, outpacing New York City in housing construction. From 2010 to 2022, the five northern New Jersey counties (Hudson, Essex, Bergen, Union, and Passaic) issued permits for 224,570 housing units, which is nearly one-third of all permits issued in the tri-state area during that period and a 25% increase from the previous twelve years.
In contrast, New York City, issued 267,261 permits over the same period despite having double the population. Zoning in Northern New Jersey is governed by local municipal ordinances, as each of the state's 564 municipalities has the authority to adopt its own zoning, land use, and building laws within its boundaries. One might well consider, then, whether local zoning authority is being used as a scapegoat to cover a range of suboptimal policy decisions.
A modern example of local "process knowledge" is Taiwan, which became so dominant in the manufacture (and eventually the design) of video monitors or displays that it simply didn't much take place anywhere else.
1) “tensions between the more nativist and more business and tech-oriented factions of the Republican Party”
What a demented dichotomy. The business of America ain’t going to be business for long if we continue on the Reagan-urged path of immigrant-driven population growth uber alles (nearly all of which since 1980 has been sub/urban, confined to where the bennies are).
2) So … NYC is not dense enough? Or NYC should not be constrained by physical geography and should instead take advantage in some fashion of spacetime being non-Euclidean? Or NYC should say to hell with the business wing of whatever and appropriate by force various under-used buildings and fill them with “refugees”?
“I suspect two reasons for this tendency on the young left. First, young people are more likely to take their politics from social media. Second, young people on the left are more likely to be female, and the female approach to conflict within groups is to exclude rather than confront or tolerate.”
While I don’t doubt that both of the reason AK cites are contributory, I doubt they are as explanatory as he suggests.
I would be willing to bet that a bigger explanatory factor is being young and college miseducated. It is that group who are the most radical, yet I’ve seen little evidence that they use social media more than the non-college young.
And while I do believe it is correct that more young females proportionally are leftists now, said female approach to conflict is neither new nor unique to only the young.
In fact, while less confident, I’d be willing to bet that simply being left-wing (I.e. a Mamdani/AOC/Bernie fan) alone is more predictive and explanatory than use of social media for politics, or being young female, or even both.
And while which direction the causation runs re: social media extremism and political preference will be hard to ascertain, I stand by the claim that political extremism in general, and excluding friends or family based on it in particular, is far less a function of said social media than of simply how leftist partisan one is.
For those of us who don't know what Joel Kotkin said that was different, can someone summarize?
More suburbs and sprawl?
Yeah, generally...he's all in on sprawl and suburbs and is disdainful of anyone thinking differently.
To be fair, I never cite a source for 'embodied knowledge' or 'tacit knowledge' or 'process knowledge.' We usually make a nod to Kuhn for paradigms, but I'm not sure why we give him that somewhat unique honor. I'd expect a scholar in a scholarly work to trace back the concepts more thoroughly than someone who is using a concept for practical purposes.
Re. Social Media, what if small, disagreeable and loud is the everything theory of social organization? Re. cities, I wonder what else happened around 1960?
The process that Daniel Davies and his progenitor Marshal imagine is "British" is another conceit by ill informed individuals.
The concept that cities are hubs of opportunity was deeply understood by several key groups in ancient China:
Philosophers and Political Strategists during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods, 770-221 BCE were way ahead of the Brits, who were still living in mud holes.
This was the foundational period where the purpose and power of cities were first systematically articulated.
· Guan Zhong (管仲, 720-645 BCE): As Chancellor of the State of Qi, he is arguably the earliest and most influential thinker on this subject. He didn't just understand that cities created opportunity; he actively designed them to do so. His policies, recorded in the text Guanzi, promoted:
· Specialized Commercial Districts: He organized the capital city, Linzi, into specific districts for craftsmen, merchants, and scholars. This agglomeration allowed for skill-sharing, competition, and efficient markets.
· State Investment in Infrastructure: He built canals, roads, and marketplaces to facilitate trade and attract people.
· Consumption-Driven Economy: He famously encouraged luxury consumption, arguing that it created demand and jobs for cooks, carriage-makers, weavers, and other artisans. His idea was that a wealthy elite spending money in the city would circulate wealth and create opportunities for the poor.
· His core belief was that a prosperous, populous city was the foundation of a powerful state. People would flock to the city for economic opportunity, and the state would, in turn, become richer and stronger.
I could continue to list Chinese philosophers and strategists through 2 millennia citing the benefits of urbanization and the agglomeration effects of urban density. I believe a major problem with Western "thinkers" is they imagine they thought of this stuff. Danny D needs to get with the program.