Down to the Suburbs
blog.shortbar.com
blog.shortbar.com
As I've gotten older (currently in my early 30s), my experience has been that most people are resentful and jealous under the surface, and they want to take out that resentment and jealousy on the world in some manner. Particularly in hard-hit and neglected areas of the country where 99% of the motivated and capable people who might have been inclined to help your optimistic vision moved out long ago.
That doesn't mean there's nothing to be done or that every neglected suburb/small town is irredeemable, but I'd be careful not to apply social optimism too generally. No amount of optimism or energy will allow you to grow crops in a salted field, you can only directly help those who want to be helped. Spend your energy where it's most productive.
That said the author is correct in that leading by example, not being a dick about it, and fixing peoples' problems is about the only tool available with any hope of earning the respect of those who disagree with you. So if you have the time, money, skill and energy it's worth at least a few tries before declaring an area beyond repair. :)
Fight vs. flight. How do you decide? I'm just a bit older than you (36 currently) and haven't figured it out yet.
Like, if I think the politics somewhere are a dumpster fire, or to use your analogy, growing crops in a salted field, how do I pick the battles I'll fight, vs. the ones where it's best to let go?
Offhand, I tend to think it's worth fighting for when the thing is very important to you personally, it's something only you can do (whether by dint of identity, skills, whatever), or the benefits are large. Probably not worth it when you don't have the patience (might take ten years but you only want to put in 5), the other side is too entrenched, or the upside isn't worth it. Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Your preferences will change over time. When I was younger, I had an intense desire to provide some grand public good. Now I regret those wasted years, and all I want to do is take pleasant walks around my neighborhood with my dog, and maybe play soccer in the park.
Most of us, almost tautologically, are similar to each other. Ask some older people what their preferences are and you'll have a reasonable idea of what you'll be like at their age. Sure, there will be generational differences, but the shift in yourself will be comparable to the shift that other people went through.
I shouldn't say I regret those "wasted" years. I regret them only to the extent I regret not having won the lottery, which is to say almost not at all. However, I want to caution against committing to a decision that might limit your options in the future. In particular, the choice of where to live has a dramatic effect on your career, your friends, and your family.
I don't think the person writing the comment was imagining this kind of city. Good luck reversing the decline of the South Suburbs. It will take a lot of work. The largest problem, in my opinion, are the oppressive property taxes (municipal consolidation is probably the only solution). Do you really think that someone can live comfortably down there for $20-30k per year? Or are you talking in terms of founders that have plenty of capital and only need $20-30k in living costs? I really don't think it's that cheap...
I own an apartment building and the rent on a 1BR close to downtown is $875/month. Mind you, this is 2 blocks from a commuter rail station in a reasonable building that includes water and parking, in a city with a great park district, good schools, and plenty to do.
I didn't say you're living high on the hog--you're getting by. The household median income in Homewood is 57k. It's no Palo Alto, just a relatively modest town with reasonable local government and people who seem to care a lot. I like this.
Illinois is clearly on a fiscal crash course. I have no doubt about that and now that the fair tax was defeated at the ballot box, it's going to accelerate the insolvency. The state needs to get its pension obligations in line with its funding levels. Obviously that's going to take a decade. But I'm pretty convinced that this state's strengths (Chicago, great universities, lots of competent local governments) could make it bounce back. Especially seeing the direction a lot of other states like California are going, or San Francisco, a city that can't seem to balance its $13 billion annual budget after it increase 50% in the last 5-10 years. Any idiot can run Palo Alto, where the median household income is $140k. It takes a lot more to make a city with about 60% less income function.
If the goal is to avoid sunk cost fallacies, I'd say the answer is same as anywhere, budgeting. Develop some general, convenient (very important they're convenient, otherwise you won't track them) metrics, so that way you have at least a general idea of how much time, money, sleep, even vague things like energy level, stress and opportunity costs can be tracked to some degree. That way you have some quantifiable measure of how many resources you're sinking into a project and if it's worth it (ie I was abnormally stressed out directly due to this effort for 137 days last year, is it worth another 137 days of abnormal stress? Or from an opportunity cost perspective I could have spent those 50 hours playing with my kids, would that have been a better investment?)
Also set some hard budget ceilings and very stiff criteria (like at least an 80% chance of meaningful progress, whatever that means specifically for the situation) for going over them. That way you don't feel trapped by the ceiling, but it still holds you accountable.
Of course it's all on the individual to maintain the metrics and stick to the budget, but I'd argue if you don't have the discipline to do even that you might want to question your ability to execute any plans for more complex community development :)
There are disadvantaged/disenfranchised communities that are that way primarily due to circumstances beyond their control (ie local large employer closed/left town) and would/will pick themselves up given the opportunity and perhaps the right leadership.
There are also plenty of disadvantaged/disenfranchised communities that are so pathological and broken every person in town could win the lottery and the community would still be in abject poverty a year later.
If you're going to try your hand at community development you have to determine which mixture of those camps your community is. It's difficult to discern, but too often the question of "what are the social/cultural issues preventing the community from moving forward, and how might those be addressed?" gets dismissed because the people who get into community development have a messiah complex and can't imagine how these poor victims they're saving might have contributed to their own circumstances. When talking about communities of color the question is often dismissed as racist. The result is superficial, overly-idealistic solutions that almost always fail.
There's a big difference between "You just can't help those people" and "I can't help those people."
As someone who grew up in one of the kinds of places these people retire to when they're old and gray I have some serious doubts that they are going to do anything other than tell everyone else "you're doing it wrong".
And many, many young people are moving back and have 'discovered' farming, forestry, and gardening. They treat it like they've discovered some long forgotten relic of an ancient past.
We do those things already. The difference is, nobody in their 80's, and nobody struggling with a family farm is making an instagram about it.
Maybe I'm getting old, and maybe I'm getting crotchety. But, if one more 20-30 year old tells me how I should be growing crops and how crop rotation works, without letting me interject that I've been doing this for longer than they've been alive, and have a current, operating partnership with the local University co-op for soil/water/native wildlife conservation projects, I'll scream.
I've lived long enough to understand that young people want new and exciting. I tried to convince my 90+ year old grandfather to invest in hemp farming in the early 90's. I get it. But, again, this is different.
There's a level of arrogance. There's a level of - you're over 45, so you can't possibly understand the internet and what's available. And there is a steadfast refusal to listen to other opinions and ideas, unless they're explicitly endorsed by glam farmers or celebrities on instagram.
I know that all sounds so crotchety and old, but it's the truth. This isn't just 'new is better'. This is 'I am better'. It's different.
The locals are going to resent you no matter what, so maybe just do what you want.
but then
> Don’t be obnoxious. Listen as much as you talk. Don’t be a blowhard.
Q: How much are the 'bias for action' and 'skills' relevant, compared with having connections and - just possibly - money ?
Cities spend money on all sorts of things -- their own tax revenues, as well as grants from higher levels of govenment (state and local). If you look at the incentive structures of most local governments, their leadership wants to be seen as "doing something". This usually translates into big, tangible projects, particularly "infrastructure", that's "large" and that ordinary people can understand: bridges, malls, stadiums, etc.
Coming from venture tech, these projects are mind-bogglingly expensive. Even a mid-size office building costs millions to construct. 10-20 stories, big underground garages, easily into $xx or even $100 million, or more. These aren't pie-in-the-sky numbers, my wife is a practicing San Francisco architect. It costs $60-70 million to build a 200-unit "affordable" apartment building with ground-floor retail. That's like 5-10 mid-sized series As. Just to build a damn building.
Point being, in my conversations with the city government, they all sort of know there's something going pretty right in these coastal cities -- many places would kill to have the tax base and jobs of a place like Austin, or San Francisco -- they really just don't know _how_ to facilitate that. So much city government is wrapped up in tangible infrastructure like business parks, highways, and shopping centers when the things I most need, as someone building a technology company, is a nice, walkable downtown, easy-to-lease commercial real estate (not landlords that require 10-year terms, 20 years of operating history, and AAA credit), a reasonably responsive government, fast broadband, a few decent coffeeshops and restaurants, and nice people. None of these things are especially expensive and given how dysfunctional a lot of the coastal cities have become, it's not hard for a lot of places to provide. They just need to know _how_.
and yet
> given how dysfunctional a lot of the coastal cities have become [...]
(Genuine) Q: Are you saying other places should, or shouldn't, attempt to copy the coastal cities?
EDIT: For full disclosure, should add that we happen to live in a small town with abnormally high tax revenue compared to the rest of this region - and indeed this country - due to the taxation arrangements in this part of the world. Lots of money to go round, sounds good? Certainly we have local amenities that other towns nearby would kill for. Yet town local politics sucks, over-engineering is rife, and money is regularly wasted. It's blessing and curse in equal measures.
At $200k a head, that $60M would provide 300 employees with a year of runway. The building will house 300 people for over 30 years. Which is a better investment for society?
We did all of this on our own. In fact, many of us here in tech have scars from being discounted outright by SV investors simply based on location. Show some respect and humility for what we've built here on our own, without your seemingly necessary support, or you'll find this movement backfire.
> Don’t be obnoxious. Listen as much as you talk. Don’t be a blowhard.
If you're interested in talking more about this check out my profile, I run a website about this kind of thing.
Edit: To be clear, the example of Uber was used as someone usurping, which doesn’t exactly accord with how I think about usurpation. To usurp to me is to claim the moral authority of the government. But in this sense, it seems to be used to describe providing services that could be provided by the government. Usurpation in the sense of claiming to be the government is bad. Usurpation in the sense of providing services the government won’t is good.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism
> 1: a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
> 2 : a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control early instances of army fascism and brutality
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/fascism
> a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.
> the philosophy, principles, or methods of fascism.
> a political movement that employs the principles and methods of fascism, especially the one established by Mussolini in Italy 1922–43.
The "usurping power" part sounds a bit scary if interpreted too literally, but realistically, I think /u/ksdale had something in mind more along the lines of ~if the government has a long track record of fucking up initiatives, a better response than sitting there and taking it is getting off your ass and do something about it. That was my interpretation, and to me that sounds like a pretty decent idea, although surely risky in some scenarios depending how one goes about it.
No one "strip mined" this guy into a comfy six figure job.
But I could no longer have the same kind of conversations that I used to with my old theology friends who were all still Biblical literalists. Not that every conversation devoloved into argument nor that I was even particularly insistent on my new view. But after some amount of talking we'd hit a disagreement and quickly find the root of that disagreement was some basic belief we held about the universe. Something as atheological as why people are philanderers comes down to whether you believe in evolution via natural selection or original sin.
And that is where America is politically today. There are fundamental facts and values we disagree about. I find writing like this to be incredibly patronizing. As if people aren't already having polite discussions about politics. As if people are voting and do not know what they are for and against. The funny part too is that we are at a point where that is least true. Voter's knowledge of their party's policies is at an all time high.
It's hard to accept that we just fundamentally disagree. But that is the fact. Eventually, one side is going to win or we'll remain deadlocked and muddle on with some hybrid policies from both sides. But the polite conversation over the pot roast isn't going to convince Nana that fetuses don't have souls. That's not a simple difference of opinion it's a difference of faith.
I point to Colorado 2013 and Colorado 2019.
- In 2012, the Democrats got full control & went after guns. They were recalled & lost control. Little was accomplished.
- In 2018, the Democrats took back full control. Polis went after instituting publicly-funded full-day kindergarten. This was a real accomplishment for everyone.
Basically, if I was a political candidate, my platform would be a ceasefire on the most high-profile wedge issues for the duration of my term!
The "leader" of this cult, who our new House members have pledged loyalty to, is a pseudonymous poster on a message board that's otherwise used mainly for child pornography, who they believe is sent from a secret arm of the government and is also a time traveller and possibly an angel of God.
What common ground do you expect the Dems should find with them?
Look at Obamacare. Most health policy wonks see it as a pretty tame attempt to fix some issues with insurance and most people support mandatory coverage for preexisiting conditions. But it's been constantly on the defensive as government interference in free markets despite attempts in it to create a more transparent insurance market.
My wealthy suburb of Seattle attempted to block light rail despite desperate need for transit essentially because they basically don't like and don't want public transit. They don't see it as a social good.
People who want drug policy changes have tried to pass every reform you can think of and by and large it hasn't really mattered how minor or radical it is. The rhetoric against reform is the same whether we're talking about recreation marijuana, safe injection sites or decriminalization. There is a segment that believe using anything other than the boot of the law upon offenders is enabling and will degrade society. And there is a segment of society that believe drug abuse isn't a moral flaw but a health concern. Again, that's a belief stemming out of values and nothing else.
To your example, there are many places where public day care would be extremely controversial because people just don't believe in taxes nor the government taking care of kids. They are already often skeptical of public schools. Frankly, the main difference between Colorado in 2012 and 2018 is probably more to do with demographic shifts than how "radial" the policy is.
In a nutshell I'm saying, all of it, everything comes down to these basic beliefs. There can be no conversation about what the government do if one side believes the government should be trusted with nothing. There can be no conversation about what we should do with tax dollars if one side believes there should be no taxes. There can be no conversation about how to reform drug policy if one side only believes in strict punishment.
Net neutrality is far from a "technocratic" issue. In many countries, media companies like facebook or Netflix do partnerships with mobile phone operators where the two agree that use of Netflix doesn't count against a user's quota. Netflix wins because they get more customer use, the operator creates a more compelling offering, and the customer wins because they get a better deal. This is called zero-rating and it flies in the face of net neutrality. There's also the fundamental issue of ownership - if someone owns the cables, why can't they set the rules? Especially in situations where ISPs can compete? And really, do you want yet another set of regulations set in stone, by a body like the FCC, that's vulnerable to regulatory capture in how it interprets and enforces net neutrality? Can you even define "net neutrality" in terms clear enough for a regulator to enforce?
Point being, it's not just about basic beliefs. There are substantive policy disagreements that don't arise purely from social differences. Sure, there are some people who just don't like transit. Maybe others think it's wasteful. Did you see New York spent 2.5 billion dollars to build less than two miles of subway recently? Reasonable people can disagree on whether that was a good use of money.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
You can site examples that validate those basic beliefs and I'm sure someone could site some that invalidate them. But whether you think those examples are an exception or the rule largely comes down to your values.
Is this true of absolutely everyone, no. The Cato Institute produced a health plan similar to Obamacare after all. Yes, there is a small group of policy wonkish people that get off on this stuff but I don't think it's the majority.
Edit: btw if my point seems to dismiss people's opinions I mean exactly the opposite.
IMO posts like this say "if we could just sit down, we could see eye to eye and find compromise". But I think what they really think is, "if we could just talk, I could resolve their information deficit and they'd come my way a little". I think that's condescending honestly and underestimates how much people believe they have thought their beliefs through, how much evidence they believe thwy have observed and how invested they are in those beliefs.
> In a nutshell I'm saying, all of it, everything comes down to these basic beliefs. There can be no conversation about what the government do if one side believes the government should be trusted with nothing. There can be no conversation about what we should do with tax dollars if one side believes there should be no taxes. There can be no conversation about how to reform drug policy if one side only believes in strict punishment.
I wonder how true memes like this really are. Indeed, various statistics and observations of what people literally say can easily lead one to form this sort of conclusion, without being terribly unreasonable. However....if one had the means of sitting down with literally each individual in these groups for a very long, non-combative heart to heart discussion, would one find that the heuristic estimates of them are completely bang on, or might there be some noteworthy differential between how we perceive people to be, and how they really are (or could be after some high quality discussion)?
1 People know their party's policy positions more than any other time in modern history
2 Legislators vote more along their party lines than at any point in history
3 People split ticket and switch votes less than any time
One partially confounding fact to my thesis here is that
4 People "identify" less with a party than at any time in history
After all, many far more reasonable approaches (incremental improvements, at least) to many things are usually fairly obvious, and I suspect most people wouldn't really be opposed to it (if one was to sit down and have a serious conversation about it that truly addresses their nuanced concerns)...and yet, decade after decade we seem to make little forward progress (or at least, "not enough" - see: BLM), while a collective feeling of confident, "righteous" frustration and rage with those "on" "the other side" (on both sides) builds.
The whole thing seems rather paradoxical, which to me is suggestive that we may indeed be missing something important in our system analysis.
To be honest, it just seems like you personally value education funding over gun control, and you're assuming most other people feel the same way while ignoring the broader national context of what was happening to the Democratic party in 2012 and 2018.
Also, what does "ceasefire" mean? If most people were ok with the status quo, it wouldn't be a major issue.
A steady 70%+ agree our infrastructure needs a lot of work. We don't agree on how to get there yet, but at least we have a shared goal.
IMO the fact you can't think of an issue is a sign of how the wedge issues concentrate attention on themselves.
it just seems like you personally value education funding over gun control
https://co.chalkbeat.org/2020/11/3/21548349/proposition-ee-c...
68% Yes on EE, while only 55% went for Biden.
"Ceasefire" means nobody is really satisfied with the status quo, but you agree to suspend the fighting for a while.
Except you'll find it very hard to get elected in the first place, which is why we don't have many politicians like that. The candidate "appropriately" far enough left or right will get hit by criticisms over the large stuff the other side, and people that would vote for them will discount those criticisms. Candidates in the middle that claim they don't want to deal with those issues will be hit from both sides with criticisms, and their own side will consider them, and the other side will use it to exclude them.
If I run for office on a platform of avoiding abortion rights to instead focus on something else, my own side will say "He doesn't care about women's rights/the lives of children", and the other side will say "he says he's not interesting in doing this, but he's stated his believe here and there, and can you really trust him?"
All that's before you get to the fact that constituents are driven into a furor on these topics, and whether any change will really be made on them, they care about electing someone that will try, even if it's very unlikely anything will happen.
Finally, what do you do as a candidate that isn't focused on an issue when the other side tries to use that as a good time to push for change on that issue? Do you then devote time and effort to at least retaining the status quo? How different does that look (and how different is it) to focusing on that issue, allowing the other side to claim they were right that you were lying about not caring about the issue? Or if you do nothing, then your own side points out that you let this issue regress.
I think the whole adversarial nature of the two groups means that any candidate basically has to at least publicly present themselves as a crusader for the issues their respective groups favor. Anything else can and will be used against them aggressively. Candidates can only be as relaxed and aligned on an issue as their respective groups allow them to be, and lately that's not at all.
The key, as you pointed out, as did Buttigieg, is to identify areas where there are shared problems you can work together to solve. There's something about local government that seems to encourage this, in my opinion. Maybe you think gay people are awful and I go the pride march every year. Guess what, the water main is still leaking, and building permits take too long. Maybe we can just focus on working together to solve real problems, and accept that there are a range of social issues where we probably won't ever agree? And that's just fine?
I think we used to know how to do this in the United States, but something changed.
It's worth considering what changed. Demographics changed, but we've always had some kind of mixed cultures and ethnicities. The history of it has been an expansion of who gets to be the "majority". Like Rome redefining who is a citizen.
Maybe it's broadcast media, but there's been national publications since the founding of the US.
Looking back to Antiquity, our situation doesn't seem so abnormal. I think it's just the ebb and flow of how groups of people interact with each other.
- Who counts as a citizen
- Who has the land
- Who gets welfare/benefits
- Who is anathema
- Who mediates power (bureaucrats? nobility? monarch? people?)
It's like a laundry list of issues that bagged ancient Rome, enlightenment France and late Tsarist Russia.
EDIT: It blew my mind when I actually started to read up on the French Revolution and found that besides what to do with the Monarchy, the issue that really divided them was Universal Manhood Suffrage. For years I had been fed the vague notion that some quasi-social-utopian issues were at the heart of it. But they really just couldn't agree on whether all men should be allowed to vote.
- Me, not all that many years ago
- law enforcement
- public transit
- property taxes
- building permits (i.e. regulation)
- zoning
- public employee pay/benefits
All redound to these basic beliefs and have the added problem of affecting people personally too.
No it wasn’t.
This is odd to me, in that the theologians I know talk to people about religion a _lot_, and seem to have no issues talking to people with different religions. That said, they're generally Catholic or agnostic, which might make the difference.
I will give an example. I can have a conversation with most Catholic theologians about the origins of the Bible for example. We can have a conversation about mistakes in translations, alternative books that might have been canon, the disparate beliefs of early Christians, etc.
With an evangelical Biblical literalist? Good luck. The very idea that the books of the Bible were chosen by a council of proto-Catholics might be enough to end that conversation.
However, the key thing is that it's not something you can really aim for. If you're in a conversation where both sides are sincere, each sides will eventually learn something from the other and it may or may not happen to be religious or political or something else. But if you go up to a distant coworker, stranger, or someone like that, you're just going to be a bunch of statements that they reject from the get go. So aside from those few exceptions, you're right, people will just disagree and aren't really open to considering different beliefs.
That's like saying it's patronizing to read someone saying "please don't speed" because there's plenty of people not speeding. There's also plenty of people that are doing it, and it's those people that it's aimed at.
> And that is where America is politically today. There are fundamental facts and values we disagree about.
There is benefit in exploring what those are. Just because differences are reconcilable doesn't mean there isn't progress that can be made. There's world of difference in a conversation that is about how "you don't care about children/women" and "we disagree on some fundamentals so can't come to a perfect solution, but perhaps some compromise on specifics is possible, even if neither of us is happy".
> As if people are voting and do not know what they are for and against. The funny part too is that we are at a point where that is least true. Voter's knowledge of their party's policies is at an all time high.
But that's only half of it, it's not always what your group is for or against, but what the other group is for or against. I would hazard a guess that voter's accurate knowledge of the competing party's policies are is at an all time low. Sometimes it's not about what your party will do, as much as what you think they'll keep others from doing, if you honestly believe those others are going to "take all our guns" or the equivalent.
There are fundamental differences, but I don't think they are at the policy level, they are far down and inform policies. I've found little at the political level that I fundamentally disagree with anyone. Usually it's a matter of one or both of us not having good data, and instead going on what we think the data is and how policies should affect it. Nobody wants poor people to be in the streets starving and freezing and sometimes causing crime, but most people don't want to devote so much to that issue that others don't get attention or they can't live their own lives. We're not disagreeing on some help to those people, we're disagreeing on how much help and how much money, and the answer to that is highly dependent on what you think works, why you think people are in that situation, whether they can ever get out of it, etc. Those are beliefs, but I think most people would be willing to reassess what they believe based on data, so they aren't fundamental.
I'd love to believe this but years of following local, state and federal politics have disabused me of this notion. Especially watching the Obama administration try that approach over and over unsuccessfully.
I guess Maine comes to mind but it's small size and idiosyncratic politics don't bode well for expanding that model across the country.
At a group level? No. At an individual level? Yes. The problems are presented by the nature of the groups competing for mindshare, and I don't know a good solution for that. That doesn't mean that we can't have substantive and productive conversations as individuals though, which is what I'm talking about here. It's important to accept that the other party may have data you haven't considered yourself though. This isn't a call to "show them why they're wrong" as much as a note that actual discussion requires an exchange of ideas and data and an acceptance that there may be things you don't know that can change your own mind as much as the mind of others.
> I'd love to believe this but years of following local, state and federal politics have disabused me of this notion. Especially watching the Obama administration try that approach over and over unsuccessfully.
I agree. It's a hard problem when scaled up. When scaled down though, I think it's still tractable.