Why We Can't Build
vox.com
vox.com
This is the lens that needs to be applied more generally. Just because a system is not achieving its stated goal does not necessarily mean it is failing - it often means that the true goal is simply something different. To take an obvious example, the US healthcare system is not failing in its primary mission, which is to transfer wealth from the population at large to a specific group. It is in fact spectacularly successful.
Andreesen's article entirely ignores this. Things are not the way they are by accident. Ignore the reasons why and you are either being disingenuous or ignorant.
If a company makes it HARD to get hired, it's probably to get you to accept an undermarket rate or sweeten the deal.
If a boss makes it confusing to understand how the promotion process and compensation process works, it's probably to keep you from getting promoted and keep you in your seat to do your job and not complain
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch!
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
It's hard to fix broken societal incentive structures when you're operating from within the society itself. That doesn't mean it's not worth trying though and sometimes you can change the incentive structure and fix the behavior, or you can still have some success within it and then leverage new found power to fix things.
I think societal/cultural optimism matters here too - since believing change is possible helps fuel the coordination that can actually make change possible. I think it's an advantage the US has over more culturally pessimistic countries (and that Silicon Valley has over other more culturally pessimistic regions).
"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
It could be well argued - or even simply stated - that, yes, US healthcare system has in fact primary mission to benefit health of US population. How'd you argue it's not the case? I, for one, know this is my idea of the system. Will you prove that those who proposed the system had other ideas? Can you get in their heads? Can you get in the heads of those implementing the system? They'll perhaps bring enough words trying to convince you otherwise - and some would be sincere.
The problem is that a big system is a collective work - and different agents have different goals in mind. Sometimes they can have compromises - agreements on goals, partial or final. Sometimes they can trick each other into doing something which benefits some agents' goals, but not others. You can't make a big system realistically without many agents - so how can you make sure they all work with similar goals?
We talk a lot about possibilities, but sometimes not enough about intentions - and especially verifiable goals. Politicians can promise many things, but it could be expensive to elect somebody who's stating something meaning something completely different - and this idea holds on various levels of public (not only public - see e.g. office politics) decision making.
No, that's the entire point greendave was trying to make. The system's goal has been perverted or coopted. This is a logical result of a corrupted system.
Relevant imagery: zerg infestation.
I think that's a good description. We can use this model to work on fixing the problem.
EDIT: milesokeefe's Wikipedia link says this better than I could.
> I don't think you should judge a system's purpose by the stated intentions behind it, you judge it by outcomes.
I do judge by outcomes. I also judge purpose - which is something which was planned, desired for before the system was built - by how I can find that purpose. If somebody tried to save a drowning person by throwing him a rope, but missed and the person died, that doesn't mean that somebody was trying to kill the person. If a system doesn't produce effect A, that doesn't mean it's not trying - as system's creator intended.
The Wikipedia article is ok, if we differentiate intents of a system - which could be a special thing for non-humans - and of system creators.
The goal of every business is to transfer wealth from the population to the business. It is a capitalist[0] society's job to ensure a system that aligns those goals with society's. When people refer to the healthcare system failing, they mean the system is not doing a very good job of delivering on society's goal's.
The abstract healthcare system itself doesn't have any goals. Doctor's, hospitals, and insurance providers all have goals, but many times they no only conflict with society but also eachother.
[0] - In a non capitalist society you are trading the "aligning firms with society" problem for the far more difficult "aligning individuals with society".
Similar evolutionary dynamics can be observed in all complex systems - life, biomes, religions, community, government, law, capitalism, tech companies, etc. Any system that does not optimize for its own survival will be replaced by systems that do. And the way to align that with the continued benefit of the humans that the system was supposed to benefit is to make systems "default dead", and then hinge their continued existence on them providing the benefit that they were created for. Unfortunately this is easier said than done, because another human evolutionary impulse is the drive to create systems that will continue to exist and benefit the person who created them (though not necessarily stated collaborators) without any additional effort.
Justice Brandeis said it best: "state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country." [1]
Imagine if States could try different healthcare systems, or basic income, etc. Citizens would be able to vote with their feet and move to the best systems. This should be a bipartisan movement.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_to_propose_amendmen...
Health care and basic income are... interesting... examples of what you're talking about. Government should certainly take better care of people at the bottom of the income ladder who need health care or money but if people who need that stuff "vote with their feet" and move to a few states that experiment with providing that stuff, the result might not be very positive for those states.
There's already an economic race to the bottom dynamic among states in a lot of ways. Delegating things the federal government should provide for everyone to the states is going to make that a lot worse.
Switzerland seems to be doing just fine, though.
Their system of government (and everything else) is radically different than ours in some pretty major respects that aren't going to change without us throwing out the constitution. Some of them are relevant to the post you replied to, for example how they handle taxation and citizenship.
The net result is an "economic race to the bottom" that has now resulted in one of the lowest income taxes in the developed world, coupled with one of the highest standards of living.
The Swiss government is largely influenced by 19th century American federalism.
In fact, even naturalization is a Cantonal responsibility:
"The State Secretariat for Migration examines whether applicants are integrated in the Swiss way of life, are familiar with Swiss customs and traditions, comply with the Swiss rule of law, and do not endanger Switzerland's internal or external security.
The State Secretariat for Migration will then “green light” an applicant’s request to begin the naturalisation process but that does not mean citizenship is certain. Rather, cantons and municipalities have their own requirements that must be met."[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantons_of_Switzerland#Constit...
[2] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/becoming-a-citizen/29288376
Singapore is authoritarian-democratic, Switzerland hyper federalist, but both exhibit a political culture that voluntarily provides liberal permissions to the relevant government institutions. In the United States (nationally, and in most states) and many European countries, such a culture has long since eroded from its mid-20th century apex.
Maybe an optimal equilibrium is one where Vermont can be authoritarian-democratic and Texas can by hyper federalist. Singapore and Switzerland seem to work because they are small polities and everyone is on the same page.
In Switzerland's hyper confederation, everyone seems to be on the same page: that nobody is on the same page :).
It's not like that kind of public opinion is uniform among the entire population of a state. Plenty of people in a state you might think of as not trusting the federal government, e.g. most states in the American south, have sizable minority populations that historically have depended heavily on the federal government's power for protection of their constitutional rights.
Not to mention, the most meaningful political differences in the United States today are between rural and and urban areas.
Yes, and like most other nation-states, minorities lose out to the majority. The question is: at what level is that acceptable? At a broad enough level, a tyranny of the majority is unacceptable, because there are no alternatives. At a low enough level, a tyranny of the majority is acceptable because it's more feasible for one to shop around. This is one of the reasons large corporate monopolies are considered bad.
> Not to mention, the most meaningful political differences in the United States today are between rural and and urban areas.
If you look at Treemaps of the US election in 2016 (weighted by population to accurately capture rural counties), there are some states where rural voters are largely on the same page as urban voters[1][2][3][4], and some where most of the state embraces a rural way of life, and hence its internal policy is better suited to that culture [5][6][7][8]. For states that are internally polarized[9][10], applying subsidiarity yet another time might be the prudent solution, but that's up to them.
Also, somewhat paradoxically, in Alaska, the urban centers typically vote like rural voters in the rest of the Union, and Alaska's rural voters vote like urban voters in the rest of the Union[11].
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_presid...
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_presid...
[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_presid...
[4] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_presid...
[5] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_presid...
[6] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_presid...
[7] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_presid...
[8] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_presid...
[9] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_presid...
[10] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_presid...
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...
Even in a city like San Francisco where people are not particularly cynical about government (i.e. that it's inherently corrupt and irredeemable, hopeless about the potential for public sector interventions), people constantly battle the government over every little action, and continue to pass ballot measures that bind government decisions. So I would argue that San Franciscans don't have a high degree of trust in their government, because trust is what you do, not in what you say.
Judging by the Singaporeans I know and the news I read, they can complain about government overreach and ineptitude just as much as any American. And I would presume the Swiss do this as well. But nonetheless they've still entrusted significant powers to their respective institutions such that those institutions can act swiftly and with a high degree of confidence that the electorate will back them.
Ever since the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars and American attempts at nation building it should be undeniable that political culture--trust, compliance, etc--matters vastly more than structure. Undoubtedly structure matters, but perhaps not in the ways we think or to the degree we think.
This becomes less and less true the more unrepresentative the institution. This level of trust is nonexistent in large heterogenous polities, and only existent in small polities (Singapore, Sweden, France, Canada, Australia) or homogenous polities (China).
This kind of race for the bottom in Switzerland is admittedly a rather fantastical idea, but for cultural reasons, not organizational ones, I think. Though the organizational differences are certainly big!
The cultural challenge is to convince most Americans of this fact, and get them to embrace subsidiarity[1], as a principle.
Cantons (and, IIRC, municipalities) have their own citizenship rules. This is totally antithetical to the US constitution.
There's plenty that they do that we could also do, yes, although it's useful to be specific.
Swiss citizens (and immigrants) are free to move and reside through Cantons as they please, just like the US. In this regard, the US Constitution creates a structure of government virtually identical to that of Switzerland. If we enshrined, say, sanctuary laws in States, there would essentially be no structural difference.
Once you become a naturalized Swiss citizen in Zurich, you’re free to move to Zug, or Jura, or wherever else you please.
That's what I wasn't sure about. Thanks!
It's local homeowner associations, the tendency to litigate everything, the inability for large actors like government or business to purchase and develop land. The one person who symbolizes the reason why modern America can't build for me is Erin Brockovich. A person without any formal training in the legal field suing an entire project into the ground, although as it turns out there's actually no scientific evidence for any of the claims, yet she's celebrated as the little guy who stuck it to the man.
Devolving power to the states may only weaken the federal government whose resources and knowledge are needed to provide large scale infrastructure. The deficit here isn't in the billions, its in the trillions.
I'm not in principal opposed to experimenting with local democracy or whatever but it needs to happen on the back of a federal government with sufficient capacity and competence and power to act quickly.
For the "states as laboratories" thing to work you actually need a mechanism to ensure that the things that work actually get adopted. I don't see this happening in the US. There's way too many inmates running their own asylums.
What resources and knowledge does the federal government have that the states don't? If the federal government has such knowledge, it should probably publish the papers, so that state and municipal experts can determine how to apply it to their region.
If the federal government lowers taxes, the states can raise theirs, and accomplish whatever objectives they need to. It's a many-billion dollar state issue in many states, which looks like a trillion dollar federal issue when you add up all the states, but there doesn't seem to be any economy of scale which makes the federal government better suited to solving the issue than any given state.
This is only true if you look at it in the absolute shallowest way. Seattle's increased output due to its subway system helps the entire country.
95% (to pull a number out of my rear end) of the use of interstates in a city are for private vehicles belonging to city residents. I-5 in Seattle doesn't "help" Miami either.
If only cooperation and decision-making were so simple.
This is probably nowhere close to true. People living in cities have less reason to use it. Interstates near and through cities benefit the broader region economically through commuters.
But the bulk of the miles of the interstate system are the boring stretches through Wyoming or wherever, and those stretches tie the nation together economically. Half of all big truck miles are on the Interstate, according to some totally random website I found.
The problem is democracy. Local governments are more democratic in the sense of being directly responsive to community interests, especially since the 1960s-era reforms. But more democracy is not always better, especially when the community makes contradictory demands. Often you end up trading away administrative efficiency.
So what does the federal government have to offer? A dispassionate, distant, and non-responsive administrative apparatus. At least in the current political context. Whether it could be effectively utilized is another question as there are also other pathologies at play, such as ideological sentiments that the federal government shouldn't be involved, period.
That federal government shouldn't be involved is also not only ideological sentiment. Current opinion is that smaller problems are better visible closely, and can be solved locally - as they are smaller - and levels of bureaucracy add significant friction.
There is a position that good democracies are local ones. Some have to delegate for common problems to higher levels, but more remote levels become less democratic - as they are more detached from people. There are counterarguments, some of them are countered in a vague "good" prefix.
These are levers generally unavailable at the lower levels of govt, especially not for the smaller states.
I'd love it if someone could point out if I'm wrong here.
I think you could argue that the housing crisis is caused in large part by the fact that states cannot limit immigration from other states. Which would suggest that, perhaps, localism would be a solution to the housing crisis.
~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Brockovich
Are you trolling?
Erin Brockovich isn't the problem. Dumping waste is the problem.
That kind of "building" just isn't helpful.
We're now firmly one country run by a "single point of failure" federal government. Sure, it delegates out some minor things to the states, but there is no doubt who is in charge.
Completely ignoring the role of community, family and friends in the "pursuit of happiness".
Not to mention weather.
This sounds great for the wealthy and those who don't have trivial issues like jobs or family tying them to one location. Sounds terrible for everyone else though.
A basic income is an underrated way of providing for this.
The only difference is that now they have money to be able to afford a U-Haul and/or plane tickets and/or any other funds necessary to uproot their life to a more economically friendly place.
Unfortunately it would probably not be that great for growth long term and effectively create ghettos away from opportunities and such a concentration would be less able to support services when comprised of the lowest end. Better than homelessness certainly but....
There's no empirical evidence of this happening anywhere else. The European Union and Switzerland are both thriving examples of decentralized governance with totally open borders and free trade, and they don't appear to have such "ghettos". Insofar as the EU has problems, it's that the Member States are starting to get skeptical of its power concentration.
I would even argue that the US today has economic ghettos because it is so centralized — it has a financial center, it has a tech center, it has a couple media centers, and everything outside is barren "flyover country". How many policy Ivy League graduate look to work in Washington DC, as opposed to one of the 50 State capitols?
Moving is not particularly expensive and if in so doing, as under this proposed scenario of moving to places with better QoL or economies, could in fact be a net positive financially for the individual/family moving (ie an investment).
It should also be noted that this already happens today and not so much so be the wealthy for whom moving actually is much less important. Take a look at net migration stats throughout the country: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2017/demo/geographic-mobi...
This idea that "only the wealthy" (how is this even defined??) have the autonomy to do anything is so played out in today's political discussions. It's a trope used without thought to the idea being proposed. No consideration given except that something might cost money and is therefore only doable by some abstract group of wealthy people.
> This idea that "only the wealthy" (how is this even defined??)
I don't know how OP defines "wealthy", but I define wealthy to start around 3 to 10 million dollars. This is due to the Trinity Study[1], which showed that withdrawing 4% of your portfolio every year gives you a 96% chance to not run out of money during a 30 year period. Therefore, a portfolio of 3 million dollars gives you a salary of 120,000 for no work. If you're willing to live anywhere other than the center of a large tech hub, 120,000 dollars is an incredible amount of money. I live in a city in Iowa, and you could live pretty comfortably with half of that, meaning your safe withdrawal rate is probably 2% instead.
I give an upper range of 10 million as a little leeway in case of extreme circumstances, or the SWR changing dramatically.
Of course, this definition of wealth is not the sort of wealth that Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates has. I think there's a distinction between personal wealth, i.e. to live your life without any worries about money, and the political wealth that billionaires have to control entire countries. I just think that my definition is the useful one for this point. My definition also does not include income, which I think is an important part of what it means to be wealthy. My impression is that income could only include more people, rather than exclude people, because people with 3-10 million dollars have an amount of income by default, via their investments.
> It turns out jobs happen to exist in cities throughout the country. Almost all of them in fact.
There is so much more risk in moving for a job than just not being able to find a job. Firstly, the relocation expenses. First and last months rent, security deposits, truck/trailer rentals, gas, food, travel expenses, moving crews, insurance for the moving crew, temporary housing while moving, utility hookups, storage costs, spousal employment assistance, and loss-on-sale allowances for your previous home. I can't find any non-paywalled studies for estimates for the cost of all this, but from the research I've done on the internet, the minimum cost to move is around $1,250 to $5,000, on local vs cross-country moves. That is only for the cost of moving itself, and not on the lost revenue from not working.
> Families are also able to move as a unit if so desired.
Not always. What about families who are not in a single home? For example, a family could have a grandma that lives in a nearby retirement home. Not only may that grandma not know how to use a widely available resource, but what about for all the things that can't be done online?
Another issue is that a good proportion of Americans are relying on their families skills and finances. As according to [2], 12% of Americans cannot afford a $400 emergency bill. That means that when your car breaks down, you can't afford to go see a mechanic. If you're part of that 12%, you first take it to your aunt/uncle/grandma/grandpa/family friend, so they can look at it for no cost. If you live somewhere else you can't do that.
A final issue is the non-financial issues related to moving a family. There are multitudes of studies showing decreased well-being in children who move during childhood. Here's [3] for an example of one.
>It should also be noted that this already happens today and not so much so be the wealthy for whom moving actually is much less important. Take a look at net migration stats throughout the country: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2017/demo/geographic-mobi....
I agree that, for the wealthy, moving is much less important. You have infinitely more resources to do it with, and furthermore, you have infinitely more resources to make your current situation livable. I'm not sure how this connects to your overall point though. I also downloaded the net migration stats, but I have no idea what they're supposed to mean in context.
> This idea that "only the wealthy" (how is this even defined??) have the autonomy to do anything is so played out in today's political discussions. It's a trope used without thought to the idea being proposed. No consideration given except that something might cost money and is therefore only doable by some abstract group of wealthy people.
Maybe it is a tired trope in political discussions, and that people are saying things without actually quoting the research. That's happening on all sides of any political discussion. But actually doing so is almost never worth the effort. To take a quote from Alberto Brandolini, "The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it". In a prisoner's dilemma sense, it seems better to reply to bullshit with more bullshit. At least then you can match the volume.
[1] http://www.retailinvestor.org/pdf/Bengen1.pdf [2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2018-repor... [3] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2010/06/moving-well-...
It also helps to think of the United States as more akin to the European Union, rather than any of its individual member states. This is purely conjecture, but an EU that is as centrally powerful as the US would likely be equally disastrous.
Trying to shove an EU-shaped peg into a France-sized hole is probably not worth the effort.
Other people replying to you in this thread seem to think people can live where they live right now and we can always resolve all the conflicting needs and desires. I think this hasn't been achieved because it cannot be. It is worth trying and why everyone should be involved in their community to keep it or change it to how they want, but I do think that there are points where you "give up" and move. I've done it before.
The Republican Party is hellbent on holding onto power by any means necessary. They will oppose any structural reforms that could reduce their power. Would they allow a system such as you propose, that allows California greater independence? Of course not.
Look how they oppose vote by mail [1], in the middle of a pandemic. Madness, until you realize they believe vote-by-mail will advantage Democrats. This is not a party that is interested in pro-democracy experiments, only changing the rules to keep themselves in power.
> There is no part of the Republican Party — not its president in the White House, not its leadership in Congress, not its conservative allies on the Supreme Court, not its interest groups or its affiliated media — that has an interest in or commitment to a fair, equal and expansive democracy...
> Republican lawmakers nationwide have taken every opportunity to restrict voting and entrench themselves against voters who might want an alternative. They’ve passed strict photo ID requirements, implemented mass voter purges, put new restrictions on registering voters, closed polling sites and ended extended voting periods. With few exceptions — Utah introduced vote by mail in 2013 — a state with a Republican executive and a Republican Legislature is a state that will restrict voting long before it tries to make it easier and more accessible. [2]
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/us/politics/republicans-v...
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/opinion/sunday/wisconsin-...
The deeper issue this raises is, I suppose, a constitutional one paired with Long Now Foundation-type questions. How do we design institutions that can't themselves be changed too easily due to majoritarian whims, yet can evolve over decades and centuries as societies change. We certainly shouldn't expect the institutions and norms of today to precisely meet the needs of our descendants decades or centuries from now.
For the here and now though, my observation is this: Americans in general are allergic to learning from what other countries do. But really, as a very large country, we should be studying what smaller countries do and using them as experimental points of data and testing them out here. There are plenty of implementations of better, more responsive governance out there. Nothing's perfect, but saying 'we're number one' and plugging our ears is no solution.
Just as Stratechery takes the latest happenings in tech, applies the core model, and spits out an article, Ezra Klein here has taken Andressen's blo, applied his model, and spat out an article.
In my opinion, if you want to know why the USA didn't respond properly to COVID-19 and why its national infrastructure is failing, ask Ezra Klein instead of Andressen.
I'm not just trusting a "vox writer" over a "VC".
Here's a thought experiment: can you use aggregation theory to make sufficiently powerful predictions to beat the stock market in the tech sector? Can Ben? My strong guess is that the answer is to both questions is no.
What does this mean exactly? I keep seeing statements like this, but I can't figure out what people are referring to.
A combination of better healthcare infrastructure (# of hospitals, beds, ventilators, nurses, doctors, etc) and also having a less deadlier strain than the one on Europe (although the deadliest strain was reported in Washington but luckily hasn't made it to the east coast).
I know this will likely go in one ear and out the other, but you should really stop listening to Fox news.
>I know this will likely go in one ear and out the other, but you should really stop listening to Fox news
Do you think that meets the HN posting guidelines? Do you think that is a constructive thing to post? Does assuming anyone who presents information you dislike is ignorant create better, more informative discussions? Perhaps you should start listening to the WHO.
Who wrote it? Wonkbook Ezra, or Vox Ezra?
What a dissapointing also-ran Vox turned out to be.
The number of research and researchers referenced per-page is very high. At times the book feels like it exists to nicely knit together of a bunch of poli-sci, sociology, and psychology research.
I believe the atmosphere within these institutions isn’t conducive to action either. Put your time in and get your pension. Do nothing and nothing bad will happen, try something big and it might fail and you look worse than everyone who did nothing.
So we need to start offering 300k/yr for middle level public servants just like programmers in California.
I agree with this, but you have to accompany that with making it just as easy to fire a public servant as it is to fire a programmer.
The bigger problem is with elected offices. We as a society aren’t wired to desire change. We generally prefer incumbents and people who maintain the status quo over anyone “radical” which is a dirty word in politics.
This leads to extreme aversion to any risk taking and creates bureaucracy.
This is opposed to the classic stories about junior engineers who lose their companies money, go into the bosses office expecting to be fired, and the boss says "why would we fire you? we just spent $X training you".
The data come from Bureau of Labor Statistics: https://freebeacon.com/issues/workers-private-sector-3-times...
In San Francisco there are plenty of government workers making well over $300K/year for a safe secure job that you can coast in. That is part of the problem.
As of 2018, about 90 people making 300k or more in SF County, probably over 100 by now.
For government you have to factor in job security, generous pension and benefits, and guaranteed annual pay raises.
Engineers have none of those things.
How about employees making $200K or over? That's 1790, or just about 4%. $100K or over? 15997 employees, or around 39%. So over 60% of SF city employees make under $100K. The median salary, in fact, is just under $86K.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that's lower than Facebook's median salary.
My anecdata is from a different police force elsewhere in the country. There, your pension is based on the average of your last 2 years of service. When you reach retirement age, it is orchestrated for you to get a promotion and as much overtime (at time and a half) as you're able to work. So people double or triple their last years' salary and then retire making more than they legitimately made before the scheme. Millions and millions of dollars are stolen from the people just through this one law enforcement pension program.
My understanding is that's not really true. They do ask a few high-achieving students to join, but those people tend to not be very active in the Party. They accept a lot more based on personal connections (first) and bribery (second).
The reason is simple -- there's no money. No public money. There's more private wealth than there's ever been, but public sector investment is a fraction of it. The state has lost the ability to collect reasonable tax revenues from private entities, and it's lost the ability to efficiently spend it.
And in large part this is because of a protracted ideological war that one side has effectively lost and another side has effectively won.
Excessive partisanship is a symptom of this ideological divide, not the cause.
I'm speaking more from the Canadian perspective; we have a Westminster parliamentary system without vetoes (well there's the senate but that's mostly rubber stamp) and yet we have the same "getting things built" dysfunction that the US has.
We order projects, but they become enormously over budget and poorly thought out, causing people to restart again or just oppose the project.
I'm a government developer. I can easily see how our bureaucracy leads to the Phoenix pay system. It is less a vetocracy and more about an overload of features.
In both cases I feel it's a broader cultural problem. In companies, it's often putting career or team or self interest ahead of company success [empire building, self promotion, etc.]; in government it's often a lack of responsibility and ethics of citizenship.
I've been involved in bidding for government projects before, and associated with he non-profit sector to boot. It was awful to see how people think and behave.
I think it's indicative of the same cultural/ideological problem I point to above: if a culture doesn't believe in the common good, in society, in social cohesion, in group projects, and if we're in a constant ideological struggle with some 50% of the population that feels that the welfare of others is no concern of theirs, and that public spending and public institutions are "socialist" (used as an epithet) -- how can we expect that same culture to be committed to actually performing civic duties and constructing things with any sense of responsibility?
In a nation where it's shark-eat-shark and "take what's mine" it's no surprise that projects complete over budget and work is done sloppily or in an expensive way.
Infrastructure in Germany seem to be in good shape. What exactly would you want them to build in addition?
The problem mentioned of the article IMO, is that of bureaucracy. The problem with bureaucracy, is that it's inevitable as an organization grows (and every type of one at that). The larger an organization is, the more bureaucracy is needed (i.e. administrative checks, balances, and communication), the slower it becomes to change and act as a whole because of it.
The only way to remedy this problem is to simplify communication and decision structures in the organization, which the article suggests. However, there is probably some theoretically optimal structure to have. But no matter how you rebuild the communication and decision structures an organization, some level of bureaucracy is needed, and as it grows more of it is needed, and the slower it becomes to act together.
Basically there's only so much rebuilding an institution can do.
The problem is there are a lot of things in local minima (or maxima if we're optimizing for maximum of some goal function).
The Penn Station story is very illustrative of this problem.
Klein writes that too many people vetoed it. But that's not what happened. No one had put up the money to do what they wanted. Every stakeholder wanted to get off easy. Sure the MSG owner did not want to move for free, neither the USPS, but why would anyone expect them to do for free?
The Federal decision to move the USPS was easy, but then no one reigned in them, so they were able to simply procrastinate for a decade. Why? Because no one gave a fuck about it in the administration. (How hard it would been to order the site manager to move in 2 years or get fired, and assign someone from MTA to check how the move is going? Easy peasy, but no, nothing like that happened.)
And ultimately NY/NJ/AmTrak doesn't want to pay for a new station, because they don't have the money for it. (To buy buildings, land there, to do a megaproject in the heart of Manhattan.)
And it's not even one institution, but many on many different levels.
And the solution seems simple, make it one, and give it a revenue stream, but don't allow it to spend it on anything else, and eventually it'll solve the problem.
Federal government spending as a percentage of GDP has been relatively stable for decades. Excepting a six year period during world war 2, government spending as percentage of GDP is basically as high as its ever been.
It's just spent on different things.
"If paralysis ended once you walked out of the Capitol, we wouldn’t have a housing crisis. We’d have better social insurance infrastructure. We’d have better infrastructure, period. But it doesn’t.
To put the question simply: Why is Penn Station, the flagship rail station in New York City, such a dump? Why can’t the richest city in the richest nation in the world have, at the very least, a train station with seating, some nice restaurants, working elevators, and an absence of human waste falling through the ceiling?"
I know some would zoom in on those pensions, but those are basically social safety net / 401k investment replacements. And the 18% wouldn't make or break large projects. Building is more expensive than ever for many reasons, which include permits and lawsuits, but also labor cost.
Efforts to raise taxes are usually thwarted by threats of business and wealthy citizens fleeing.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-spendi...
EDIT: misread chart, made false claim above. 1980 was a few percentage points of GDP below 2019 spending. Sorry for the false claim.
(imagine say, the internet, etc)
In my defense, I think it still shows something quite different from what the OP was claiming. But I was even more clearly wrong.
I find more and more, especially after the recent crisis, that the reality is our Democrats and Republicans have been fighting over meaningless ideals and have left things like impacting measurable outcomes in the dust. Each party is built around some kind of bull shit moral that defines the in/out groups and then cronyism wherever/however they can get it for their in group.
faced with staunch refusals to consider any type of revolutionary building at the institutional level, would-be builders reduced their hopes to incremental changes, bringing us to the current state of affairs.
after enormous legislative efforts, incremental and generally insufficient changes are made to support the strength of US institutions. then, as part of the dealmaking necessary to make any changes whatsoever, other institutions are degraded incrementally in trade. the system of the country's institutions never becomes stronger in terms of its total sum of capabilities, it only reshuffles them.
imagine trying to build a house when half of your building team never lets you purchase any new materials, only permitting you the use of bricks that are already built into the house. you have to remove a brick from the foundation to place it on the top of a half-constructed wall. that's the situation the US is in. it's untenable.
there isn't going to be a tidy legislative solution to this kind of intractability anytime soon because the people with the most money prefer the current situation and fund politicians accordingly.
lest you think that the point of my comment is to blame republicans or democrats, let me tell you that it isn't. my point is that america cannot build because it cannot accept that building requires spending, as spending would require contradicting the will of the political donor class. we needed to get money out of politics back when occupy wall street was calling for it. the next best time is now.
in a nutshell, the rich need to do their part to contribute to society and accept that their influence must be curbed if the country is to flourish once again. as we know, there's no chance of them doing this of their own accord. i'll leave the details of how we can get them on board with rebuilding the country to the imagination of the reader.
"Marc Dunkelman spent years cataloging the many failures to revamp Penn Station, a number of which came complete with hefty doses of federal funding. Each time, the story was the same: Plenty of people who wanted to build, and plenty of money with which to build, but too many people with vetoes who simply didn’t want the building to happen."
The difference in the two groups is the affluent can pretty effectively build hedges (literal and figurative) to keep prying eyes off what they're actually doing, while pro athletes by design are in the spotlight.
I wonder what would happen if the affluent were compelled somehow to acknowledge just how much wealth they have and what they do with it. Maybe this already happens via tax returns but most people don't know where to look?
In any case, as you've stated, if capitalism has taught us anything, "morality" or "should" have zero effect on actual societal behavior. There must be a forcing function where the benefits of a particular behavior are obvious and outweigh the negative.
I skimmed the article and searched for "pork" to no results, so I assume there was no mention of what I'd say is the real problem - I don't think any modern bills come without pork, and that's part of the idiocy keeping our political system from working efficiently. Bills have exploded in size out of purely selfish political gaming wherein sponsors will attach dozens of pet projects as riders and as an added bonus, anyone who votes against the riders can be smeared later as voting against the primary topic of the bill. On top of that, because of this practice our politicians aren't even reading most of what they vote on. It's totally broken but short of a collapse I'm not sure how to convince a few hundred senators/congressmen to stop this idiotic, scummy practice.
If state A starts using its own tax revenue to house the homeless population, nothing stops states B through Z from then deciding to bus their homeless populations to state A. The other states then don’t have to pay for homeless services, and suddenly state A has a far larger homeless population to house (while its tax revenue hasn’t increased at all).
Both of these are true in Switzerland, as well as the European Union, and yet they are both body politics that are fully capable of effective decentralization.
Insofar as the EU has issues, it's because power has begun to become too centralized, and there are growing Euroscepticism movements across the Union.
You can see this manifest in the ideological breadth of representatives within the same party, across different constituents. In a parliamentary system, some of those constituents would elect the same representative, just under the banner of a more appropriate political party.
This is a level of variation that surpasses even the US. While Texas doesn't have an income tax, the net marginal tax rate for a Texan is 37%, while the net marginal tax rate for a Californian is 50.3%, or a more modest 36%, and that's the most extreme in our Union.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Switzerland#Income...
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/11/29/penn-stati...
If even half that money were spent on an actual industrial policy we would be in much better shape. I maybe shouldn't be surprised the Vox article doesn't mention this.
It has been assumed for a long time that the US could easily win any major conflict, but is that really so true anymore?
NATO is as weak as it's ever been. Europe is less likely than ever to trust the US or to support it. Key allies are now looking more inward than outward.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were large scale blunders that cost trillions for little benefit. US manufacturing capability has gone down dramatically. There are not enough with trade no-how to support a large scale war-effort. Any war of attrition is likely a losing one - it will be too costly if it's possible at all.
Key positions of government and diplomacy go unfilled because of the Trump administration's refusal to do so, severely limiting US soft-power across the globe.
A captain of a capital ship was publicly relieved of command by acting SecNav (Trump has yet to fill the position permanently, still. The Secretary of the Navy. Still no permanent leader.) in embarrassing fashion after a COVID19 outbreak onboard. That is extremely telling.
A huge portion of military-service eligible citizens are far too overweight to serve. Numbers more are disqualified for other reasons. Waging war requires smarter soldiers - which are not in abundant supply.
Misinformation has been weaponized by Russia and China and the current leadership has done nothing about it because it benefits them.
The polarization divides the country sharply - if one party or the other goes to war, would the rest of the country support it?
There are significant cracks in the armor.
Does that include building the wall, privatizing social security, eliminating the income tax, or implementing school choice? When you live in a country where one side just wants to undo the policies of the other, there's a deeper problem.
Naval Ravikant said on Joe Rogan 1309, and I'm paraphrasing, if you want to build a good system, give it to your enemy for 10 years.
We can't build because the idea of "we" needs to be reevaluated.
Elected officials can rely on dogma too, styling themselves like sports teams, knowing that because actually accomplishing something is off the table for both parties, they have to appeal to voters almost entirely by signaling their virtues.
Yes, it would mean rapid fluctuations in policy, but the idea is that we need to inject some volatility so we can see what works and what doesn't. Obviously, this can lead to problems, like a majority party implementing policies which restrict the electorate or affect populations that can't form a strong voting coalition, but I'm not sure this is worse than what we have already.
Further, I'm not really sure how we're supposed to reevaluate "we." That's a neat soundbite, but what does that mean? What are you suggesting we actually do? Alter the electorate? Split the union?
There's no need to split the Union if we just follow the US Constitutions as the Framers intended: a Union of States with powers broadly vested in the States (see: the 9th and 10th Amendments).
The more we take out of the purview of the Federal government and the more we allow States the leeway to enact whatever systems they wish (democratically), the more the States coexist harmoniously. The United States begins to look like the European Union.
I'm not sure I fully grasp your point, but yes we absolutely should allow this. Voters need to personally experience the impact of voting for different parties in order for them to make better choices. The median voter isn't informed, or educated enough to be able to gather, and evaluate between different party platforms in any other way.
He contends that if the USA public could see active governance by their political parties they could be choose between them. Klein would hope (and expect) that the majority of citizens would react quite negatively to a GOP government that gets most of what it wants done, and vote them out of office.
Exhibit A of government boondoggle program is most expensive NASA programs. SLS (Space Launch System) - and its predecessors have spent so much that humanity could have a sizeable buzzing town on the Moon for that kind of money.
The problem is that government both too afraid of responsibility in some places and very irresponsible in others, and there is no working mechanism to timely deal with that.
his suggests reforming institutions to be more responsive to what people want, not minorities who have a vested interest in the status quo
Ezra Klein is indeed left of center by US standards (which means he’s a centrist anywhere else). But he’s making a different point.
I listen to his podcast, and with characteristic understatement, he’s been saying something like “I think the government should be able to enact a program, and have voters judge if it’s a success.” He believes that because of vetocracy that parties now escape accountability as well, they never get to fully implement their idea so they gain electoral success by demonizing or blaming the other group. Klein is saying that he’ll even take a right wing idea (like education vouchers) as long as they get to really do it and own the success or failure. Over time he thinks we’ll get better policies that way & less empty ideological posturing.
(I believe I have fairly characterized Klein’s views here. They are not my own.)
Funding which is not optimally allocated is much worse than no funding at all.
Imagine if there are two people:
- PersonA who has the potential to produce a lot of value but is useless when it comes to pitching ideas to investors because they spend all their effort thinking about how to solve problems.
- PersonB who is useless at creating value but is really good at selling empty ideas to investors because they spend all of their effort thinking about their pitching techniques.
In our economy, PersonB will beat PersonA every single time. What this means is that PersonA cannot get any funding at all and they end up being forced to work as an employee of PersonB who doesn't know what the heck they're doing because the only thing they are good at is attracting investors and telling them what they want to hear.
In reality, it would be more efficient to let PersonA get all the funding and put PersonB on welfare (because PersonA would be smart enough to not hire them). As good as PersonB is at talking and convincing people to give them money, the reality is that they are less than useless for the economy. Unfortunately, we cannot BS our way to a stronger economy.
If you watch some interviews by Masayoshi Son of Softbank, you will understand this. The guy is a genius at convincing people of the most fanciful, outlandish ideas - But he added no net value... He just distributed the funding he received to other snake oil salesmen like himself. The biggest VC in the world didn't know what the heck he was doing and was giving money to other people who also didn't know what the heck they were doing.
I think it would be better if the activity of investing or loaning money would be made illegal. People should just get rich and retire; let the next person have a go.
Getting rich and not retiring is immoral IMO. These people have every tool necessary to enjoy the rest of their lives but they prefer to stay in control and dedicate their entire careers to preventing other people from getting the same opportunities as they got.
Because of them, our entire economy is now founded on the arbitrary top-down picking of winners instead of bottom-up value creation.
1. How can you tell type A from type B before seeing them to ensure the "right" people get all of the funding?
2. Part of the reason the rich are encouraged to work is because they have proven high value of sort - regardless of the basis of the evaluation. The immorality assumes a smooth transition of similiar expertise would be trivial - along with experience not mattering. To be frank that is seldom the case.
3. Capital availability allows for upscaling which gives massive efficency over the small scale - it is why the megacompanies can retain dominance. If they could only produce product at a worse margin and quality then dealing with a mass of small scale producers would be a way to get concrete gains.
I don't buy this argument at all, especially when you consider that history has shown that they need to get bailed out every 10 years or so. They're successful because they're all running on free credit - Either credit that they took themselves against their own collateral or credit taken out by other entities who fund them (either as investors or as customers).
It's very simple. Entities which have capital can use that capital as collateral to receive bank loans which they can use to multiply their profits. There is a nice interview on YouTube where Steven Schwarzman from The Blackstone Group (with assets of $500 billion) explains how this works (and has worked for 30 years as he openly brags): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kThTbLUQdU
Basically whatever capital you have to invest, you can go a bank and take a loan against it and double how much of the underlying asset you can buy with the same base capital... Effectively this allows you to supercharge your ROI... Your $1 million which would have given you a ROI of 10% can be used as collateral to secure an additional $1 million loan so that you end up holding twice as much of the asset and 20% ROI (relative to your original 1 million). You just hold the asset for a year or two, then dump and repeat. Can small business without any capital compete against that? No because they're on a different playing field; one where 20% returns are simply not possible.
You could argue that these people are taking a risk, but guess who the Federal Reserve Bank chose to execute the bailout for the covid19 financial crisis? A group called 'Blackrock' https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/business/blackrock-federa... - If that company sounds like 'Blackstone', it's no coincidence, the two companies share a common history. Search for 'Blackrock' in the Wikipedia article about 'The Blackstone group': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blackstone_Group
When you consider that this credit is printed by banks out of thin air, it's no mystery why the rich get richer. The surplus ROI which they derive from access to free credit is basically just free money.
In the section on the federal government, he identifies the senate filibuster. The filibuster means you need a supermajority of the vote in a deliberative body that's already not representative of the majority of the population.
You can argue that minority veto power is a good things, but the senate is definitively not a body that represents the "clear majority" of Americans. Even prior to a fillibuster, the senate is not even intended to be a body that represents "a clear majority".
The US could be building our way out of the housing crisis
and later in the article:
You can see it in the inability of American cities to build public transit
The author clearly isn't implying that the Senate's filibuster is the reason SFBA has a housing crisis when we writes about the senate. You can tell because housing is discussed in a section on "The state and local veocracy" while the senate is discussed in the section entitled "The federal vetocracy"!
He's identifying the filibuster as one instance of "vetocracy" that causes certain issues. By "vetocracy" he's referring to a phenomenon that happens at the local, state, and federal levels. The effects at each level are different. In fact, vetocracy even in the private sector (dear god have I some first hand experience with that!)
The senate is at the federal level, not the sort of state/local issues you identify.
The author identifies many other examples of vetocracy.
In particular, there is a section entitled "The state and local vetocracy", in which he discusses state and local issues such as the ones identified in your post. And the author even identifies some of the root causes from your posts. E.g., he links to an hour+ discussion between a leftist and a libertarian on "neighborhood defenders", i.e., the NIMYism you identify in your original post!
As a meta point, section titles are super useful. When reading, I always read the intro and then skim section titles. Only after that I then read through the article. It's a simple but useful reading comprehension trick. For example, in this article, it's easy to lose the overall flow of the argument. However, if you skim the section titles first, you certainly won't make the reading comprehension mistake of confusing content in a section entitled "federal" as talking about state and local stuff when there's also a section entitled "state and local" :-)
I'll restate it for you: The crisis in building is bottom up. The senate has marginal relevance to most building, be it local housing or bigger infrastructure projects like bridges, airports, or dams. Even if the filibuster was eliminated, projects wouldn't proceed because there is enough local power to stop them. So calling out the senate is misplaced priority. You need to loosen up the local level first, then worry about getting more federal money flowing.
I.e., "What percentage of 'building' is blocked because of a filibuster in the senate"? Not much. If you want proof, look back at 2009 when the Senate was willing to dump a ton of money into infrastructure, and nothing interesting got built. The money was directed into a bunch of non controversial road projects and maintenance that would have happened anyway.
The first sentence of the article's section on state and local housing makes it very clear that the author does not blame the senate filibuster for the housing crisis:
If paralysis ended once you walked out of the Capitol, we wouldn’t have a housing crisis. We’d have better social insurance infrastructure. We’d have better infrastructure, period. But it doesn’t.
I.e., if we had a senate filibuster but state and local governments didn't have other forms of vetocracies, then we wouldn't have a housing crisis.
No one here thinks the filibuster is responsible for SFBA's housing issues. Not me, and certainly not the article.
If you can't understand from the above quoted sentence that the author doesn't believe that getting rid of the senate filibuster would fix housing issues, then I'm not really sure how to help. Other than to suggest brushing up on your reading comprehension skills.
Because I disagree that the filibuster has a substantial negative impact of building projects of ANY kind. Which was literally what my initial comment was.
You are fixating on housing but I mentioned many other building project types. I only mention housing because it is the type of project that is most affecting individuals right now.
Again, who are you arguing against? Who is god's name do you think is saying that local building projects are stymied by the senate?
The article doesn't just not make that claim, it explicitly makes the opposite claim. And not just for housing, but also for infrastructure.
The article doesn't just not make that claim, it explicitly makes the opposite claim. And not just for housing, but also for infrastructure.
No it doesn't, never once. It suggest the filibuster is the first tier of the problem, and if it went away, there are additional tiers of vetos.
If the problem was that 51% of people didn't want those things, well that's just democracy. For a true veto, one person is "enough people." That's an exaggeration in this case, but the point he's getting at is that it takes a very very small minority to prevent things from moving forward. And there will almost always be some people invested in the status quo, or even just trying to block things in the hope of getting some kind of payoff in return (trolls, basically).
*Assuming a uniform population-voter proportion across states, which is undoubtedly not quite the case, though I don't have the exact numbers handy.
It takes 40 Senators to ensure something doesn't pass Congress. It takes a single President to ensure something doesn't become law--a literal veto.
"Enough people" needing to be literally "every person" is a big part of the problem.
The US, as a Union, is also unique in that _every single state_ agreed to join by ratifying the Constitution (same cannot be said for the European Union). The States agreed to this because part of the deal was the federative system of checks and balances that preserve their sovereignty to a large degree. That was the contract, that's what they signed up for. Unless we can come up with a way to convince these states to voluntarily relinquish their sovereignty, States will just walk away from the deal if they think that the contract they signed up for is violated after the fact.
The 10th Amendment is our tool for ensuring that change can eventually propagate through the entire system in a stable way.
That single president has to be elected though and by definition represents the majority of voters/electorate (modulo whatever special voting mechanisms the country has).
You can't change the system from within. You have to crush it and build something completely new or you just end with the same filibuster situation just about what system of systems to build.
You can't change a system with the very principles that create the system to begin with.