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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Voting is how we got here. A city or any entity can adopt exclusionary policies based on the votes of the people who already live there, which obviously excludes the people to be excluded. What we need is the next higher level of government to set basic ground rules. There should be a state right-to-build law that automatically permits a moderate level of density. There shouldn't be any place within incorporated cities of California you can't build a four-family dwelling on a 4000-square-foot lot.

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"What we need is the next higher level of government to set basic ground rules."

(to the parallel discussion, further upthread ...)

Here is a very good example of the state of the current debate that I was referring to. Democratic processes that produce undesirable outcomes are rejected.

Or, as I said:

"Democracy for me but not for thee."

Fortunately in the US, it's democracy all the way down (up?). The issue is that while municipal zoning boards are great at producing good outcomes for homeowners they are terrible at producing good outcomes for the region's residents. Unless we're going to start arguing for the abolition of state / federal governments then it's perfectly reasonable to discuss which democratic body best encompasses all the stakeholders. We don't let towns vote to secede from the US either.

Cities in California are creatures of the state. The state can usurp any of their powers, your thoughts about ideal, spherical, frictionless democracy notwithstanding. It's the same principle under which the state of Georgia is unable to simply vote that black people aren't humans, because the federal government forbids it.

Did you support non-federal legalization of Marijuana in California ?

I did.

I hope you'll continue to forgive me if it seems, to me, that many people are very excited about local control when it produces results they agree with.

The difference is that the legalization only affects the people in that region, whereas exclusionary housing policies affect other people who would like to move to the region, but cannot (because they did not get into the region fast enough, for example, because they are young) and therefore cannot vote on this issue.

That is literally "Democracy for me but not for thee." - people who made it there early ("me") can vote, and do (effectively) vote to keep newcomers ("thee") out and therefore not voting on those "local" policies. Yet somehow you turn it on its head.

I think policies should be decided at the level at which they affect people. As an example that I think we can both agree on: Foreign policy -> federal. Noise ordinances -> county. Would you consider this "Democracy for me not thee" as well?

I don't care whether I convince you, but I would really like to understand how your viewpoint interacts with my argument. If I understand it right, the core of our disagreement seems to be that I consider everyone who wants to move somewhere a stakeholder who should be able to vote, and you only consider people who already are somewhere. The rest follows from that.

"If I understand it right, the core of our disagreement seems to be that I consider everyone who wants to move somewhere a stakeholder who should be able to vote, and you only consider people who already are somewhere."

I don't know if that's the core of our disagreement but I certainly do disagree with that.

I think that I need a new term - I continue to use the word "stakeholder" but I am open-minded to the idea that someone who works in a place or consumes services in a place ... or even vacations in a place could be considered a stakeholder, of sorts.

I, on the other hand, am trying to distinguish people who have skin in the game - who have dedicated their life energies and life savings to a particular community.

We need to draw that line somehow and I think the purchase of real property is a decent candidate.

Well, their wish to move into a desireable area has no power over those who already live there.

The bay area problem is easy to solve, though: tie the number of office space permits to the number of single family houses. With such a law, a big corp won't be able to build another tower and bring 5k more employees there. What prevents such a law from happening is greed: the SF city council understands that there's no room there for another 50k office workers, but it can't resist the payroll taxes those will bring.

I did too, but that’s obviously not contradictory unless I supported the federal prohibition, which I did not.

> the same principle under which the state of Georgia is unable to simply vote that black people aren't humans, because the federal government forbids it.

I think in this context, it's fair to note that this situation is itself something that can be changed by a minority of voters nationwide + another minority in Georgia.

If Thomas Jefferson hadn't replaced "property" with "pursuit of happiness" when he quoted Locke in the Declaration of Independence, we probably wouldn't be in this situation. People who own land should be free to use it as they wish as long as they aren't violating the rights of somebody else. Building an apartment building or a store anywhere you want should be fine but building a factory or power plant that pollutes or an open air stadium to hold concerts and sports events next to somebody's house without their permission wouldn't be. Free use of your own property should be a constitutional right just like free speech, freedom of religion and owning guns are.

Meh, it's harder. I don't want my neighbor to be blasting music at 2am, so you do need some sort of regulations.

> free to use it as they wish as long as they aren't violating the rights of somebody else.

That's the part with the regulations, right?

Why is clean air and lack of noise any more fundamental than, say, access to public transportation, nearby food markets, etc.?

You are right, however if voting were mandatory nationwide the situation you're describing wouldn't happen.

If 1000 people live in California and 100 of those people live in Berkeley, even if all 100 people in Berkeley agree with something, if the majority of Californians disagree it would and should override what the Berkeleyians want.

If voting is mandatory there's no situation in which a majority decision is actually suboptimal, unless you believe that a minority should somehow be able to override a majority.

The way democracy is implemented in this country is effectively rule of the minority over the majority - the catch is the minority just has to draw arbitrary boundaries surrounding their decisions. You can already see this if you just look at the Bay Area - how can it be so difficult to build if polls show the majority of people support it? Turns out the minority (homeowners) have more power than the majority (renters) in the Bay Area.

> If 1000 people live in California and 100 of those people live in Berkeley, even if all 100 people in Berkeley agree with something, if the majority of Californians disagree it would and should override what the Berkeleyians want.

This comment is facile. Your stance is much more broad and encompassing than "mandatory voting" if you're saying that higher levels of government have unilateral authority to override local authority.

> If voting is mandatory there's no situation in which a majority decision is actually suboptimal, unless you believe that a minority should somehow be able to override a majority.

What if the majority make a law saying "anyone gay or black is to be executed"?

Or "anyone with more than $1 million in assets should pay a 90% tax rate"?

Or "wildfire prevention, nuclear power plant inspection, SEC regulation, should all be defunded in favor of a federal football team with free bread at the stadium"? Maybe it takes 10-20 years for huge-impact consequences to be felt, and in the meantime you get free bread.

> What if the majority make a law saying "anyone gay or black is to be executed"?

What you're saying has already happened. The majority realized that was a terrible idea and undid that law.

> Or "anyone with more than $1 million in assets should pay a 90% tax rate"?

What's wrong with that? If it ends up being a bad idea the majority will undo the decision.

> Or "wildfire prevention, nuclear power plant inspection, SEC regulation, should all be defunded in favor of a federal football team with free bread at the stadium"? Maybe it takes 10-20 years for huge-impact consequences to be felt, and in the meantime you get free bread.

Yes, and once the realize the consequences the majority will undo their decision.

There are no problems with any of your examples. What's the alternative? The minority of the population makes all of the decisions?

> What's the alternative? The minority of the population makes all of the decisions?

That some decisions are based on evidence and expert-knowledge. Of course, this can be gamed, but it's not clear at all that this risk is greater than the risk of damage by the short-term thinking or false reasoning of an uninformed majority.

I disagree - in your post you're assuming an "uninformed" and "false reasoning" with respect to the majority but not this so-called "expert" minority. Knowledge spreads - the majority will take it into account, and if they're wrong the majority will undo it as the majority will feel the effects.

I would argue this claim is empirically false.

> and if they're wrong the majority will undo it as the majority will feel the effects.

This assumes the majority will correctly identify the root cause. Whereas, in fact, they cannot do this even in simple cases, let alone a case where the root cause was an innocuous-seeming policy enacted 10+ years ago. Especially while the current politicians du jour are providing dramatic, simple, alternative narratives of the cause to suit their own goals.

> This assumes the majority will correctly identify the root cause. Whereas, in fact, they cannot do this even in simple cases, let alone a case where the root cause was an innocuous-seeming policy enacted 10+ years ago. Especially while the current politicians du jour are providing dramatic, simple, alternative narratives of the cause to suit their own goals.

I agree, but it's still no worse (and in practice much better) than trying to let the minority figure it out, whom are no more likely to figure out the root cause either.

We can probably agree that governance is complicated though.

> We can probably agree that governance is complicated though.

Yes. I don't think there is an obviously correct solution either way. I'm really only arguing that "trust the majority" is not something I trust. Not that "trust experts" is without its own (possibly equally fraught) set of problems.

Basically, the main reason we have a Supreme Court is so the majority doesn't have absolute power.

No, if the entire population of the United States, except the members of the Supreme Court agreed on something they can and would override all Supreme Court decisions. The Supreme Court does not function the way you think it does.

The main reason the Supreme Court appears to have so much power is because our Legislative Branch has been slow to actually pass new laws, meaning the interpretation of existing laws to new scenarios is becoming more and more important.

If an overwhelming percentage of the population disagrees with the Supreme Court on something, they can of course pass a constitutional amendment. For example, if enough people didn't like the Obergefell v. Hodges decision (gay marriage), a constitutional amendment could presumably (IANAL) have been passed that said states can only recognize marriage between a man and a woman.(This may get into state sovereignty issues but not important for this discussion).

Now, as a practical matter, the Supreme Court is a political creature and tends not to stray too far from popular opinion. Thus, the decision above was possible in 2015. It's likely not a right they'd have "discovered" in 1980.

However, the Supreme Court has certainly made decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education that were almost certainly not majority opinion even in many relatively liberal locations.

I think we have a slight misunderstanding. I'm not saying that the Supreme Court doesn't make decisions that are not popular. I'm simply responding to the original claim that the Supreme Court exists so the majority doesn't have absolute power, as you originally stated. This we now apparently agree on.

Now, as for the rest of your post - I completely agree.

You're splitting hairs. The Supreme Court is absolutely a check on majority rule--even if it's also the case that it can effectively be over-ridden by a supermajority that goes through a typically lengthy constitutional amendment process. That it's a check doesn't mean that it has absolute final say for all time.

>> the Supreme Court is a political creature and tends not to stray too far from popular opinion.

Supreme Court's role is to be a stabilizing factor, because majority can switch from Democrats to Republicans every four years. Supreme Court's partisan composition is basically a moving average of the last 5-6 presidential election's results, thus smoothing out temporary whims of the society.

> majority can switch from Democrats to Republicans every four years.

Two years, actually, assuming only regular elections and ignoring other changes in office-holding.

> If voting is mandatory there's no situation in which a majority decision is actually suboptimal

If majoritarianism defines optimality this is tautologically true, otherwise it is distinctly non-obvious.

> unless you believe that a minority should somehow be able to override a majority.

The belief in inalienable rights is exactly the belief that on some issues a hypermajority of all but one is suboptimal.

So, yes, it's true that majoritarianism is optimal unless one believes that sometimes it's not, but not believing that majoritarianism is sometimes suboptimal is equivalent to not believing in human, civil, or political rights beyond the right to an equal vote.

I understand what you're saying, but in terms of coming up with a decision in which the majority is happy, a majority decision is inherently always the most optimal. The parent post example is effectively an example of that.

I do concede that for general governance what I'm talking about obviously requires more nuance.

> I understand what you're saying, but in terms of coming up with a decision in which the majority is happy, a majority decision is inherently always the most optimal

Sure, but why would that be the goal unless one believes that utility is a simple binary of “happy” vs. “not happy” and policy choices are also simple binaries?

If the amount of (un)happiness is more complex than 0/1 and you have a complex multidimensional policy space, majoritarianism may be the most tractable general approach, but it is delusional to think it is necessarily inherently optimal.

A lot of rules diverging from majoritarianism in otherwise majoritarian systems are designed in recognition of this and in the belief that the concentration of impacts of decisions in a particular domain make it particularly prone to the kind of things where majoritarianism is distinctly nonoptimal.

What about a 60% majority voting to commit kill the other 40% of the population because they felt mildly irritated by that 40%? How does killing 40% weigh against relieving the irritation of 60% and how is that optimal?

Again, this has already happened in the American Civil War. In your example the issue would be resolved or the country should fracture.

Also, would the reverse scenario (40% deciding to kill the 60% majority) be more optimal? No, it wouldn't. Assuming people have to die, it would be more optimal for the 40% to die than the 60%. Obviously if this was actually happening a moderate stance would emerge and they (being the majority likely) would decide there shouldn't be any death at all and that would win out.

Your examples are ridiculous and make having a meaningful discussion difficult. A good example, if you can think of one, is one where the minority is right and the majority is wrong without stating the majority is somehow worse than the minority.

Basically you are saying that California cities should not have planning authority. I happen to agree but that's not on the table.

Folks moved into a single family home region/city for a reason - to live in not a mass developed community. Now outsiders would force them that they can't do so.

1. Historically that's not true.

2. Even if it were true, that would imply SFH are superior. There would be no need to make SFH-zoning mandatory then. The free market would show that SFH is the most cost-effective.

3. If there were folks living in an area that was previously SFH-only that's now becoming more and more filled with multi-families that would imply their SFH are now worth more and more. If they actually prefer SFH living they would cash-out and move to an unpopular area where SFHs are the norm. In practice what a lot of these people want is to live in a popular area, but not have any neighbors. In effect this is at odds with a democracy - the will of the minority must not override the majority.

That clearly isn’t true of Berkeley. The current zoning and design rules of Berkeley outlaw Berkeley as it stands. The current question is whether we should return to the rules under which 85% of the city was built.

> Folks moved into a single family home region/city for a reason

(To get away from Black people.)

What do you think that no planning authority achieves? The majority of actual high density cities that got that way in the last 100 years have been pretty highly planned. The best low planning examples of recent years have generally been suburban.

Got a counterexample?

I didn’t say that planning shouldn’t exist. I think most of the powers should be reserved by the state, though.

I disagree with that position, but I concur that the residents of the state could vote to give that power unilaterally to the state [in a way that the federal government could not seize that power from the states, at least in theory if we followed the Constitution].

I think that decisions should be as locally as is feasible, whether that's individual, family, neighborhood, town/city, county, state, or federally only as a last resort.

The state constitution already favors the state wherever there is conflict. If the state passed a law that anyone could build such-and-such thing, that would preempt any and all city laws.

I misunderstood.

It's not about California specifically - in general the majority should always have to ability to reject the decision of a smaller body by pure simple majority. To believe otherwise is basically to not believe in democracy.

To some extent this is already possible, but with gerrymandering and non-mandatory voting the obvious solution to this problem for the minority is just to suppress votes - hence mandatory voting.

A majority with no standing in the matter should have zero influence over the rights of a minority whose interests are directly affected. You're advocating the two wolves vs. one sheep model of unchecked direct democracy, which is pretty much the worst of all possible choices short of a malevolent oligopoly or dictatorship. When people speak fondly of "democracy" what most of them have in mind is a representative, republican form of government with at least some legal protection for the rights of minorities, even when the majority disagree.

This is orthogonal to the issue of whether voting should be mandatory or (pseudo-)voluntary[1]. Mandatory voting ensures higher participation at the expense of encouraging less informed voting on average. It also masks the absence of consent which would be implied by abstaining. (You can turn in a blank/voided ballot in protest under most mandatory systems but there is no record of who did that, whereas there must be a record of who did or did not vote.) "Voter suppression" is frankly not a very plausible explanation for why a majority of outsiders with no particular interest in the matter have thus failed to vote to set aside local planning rules (which for the most part don't affect them) and force cities to allow more high-density construction. Even if you made voting mandatory it's unlikely that this would change. And are you going to require everyone in the state (or country, or world) to take the time to vote yes or no on every trivial local ordinance? Besides being impractical, that would certainly generate a great deal of resentment regarding both the mandatory voting and the outside interference in local affairs.

[1] "Pseudo-voluntary" because to be actually voluntary the majority would need to respect the preexisting rights of those who didn't participate in the vote and the absence of their consent, and refrain from infringing on those rights as they attempt to carry out the majority's will. Since in practice you'll be made to conform to the result whether or not you participate, and others will insist that you accept the majority's will because "you had your chance to be represented" regardless of the degree of influence you did or (more likely) did not have on the outcome of the vote, it can't really be considered voluntary.

> A majority with no standing in the matter should have zero influence over the rights of a minority whose interests are directly affected. You're advocating the two wolves vs. one sheep model of unchecked direct democracy, which is pretty much the worst of all possible choices short of a malevolent oligopoly or dictatorship. When people speak fondly of "democracy" what most of them have in mind is a representative, republican form of government with at least some legal protection for the rights of minorities, even when the majority disagree.

Sure, but this never happens in the real world - all people are connected.

> "Voter suppression" is frankly not a very plausible explanation for why a majority of outsiders with no particular interest in the matter have thus failed to vote to set aside local planning rules (which for the most part don't affect them) and force cities to allow more high-density construction.

I'm not sure you're from the USA but this is just not true at all. Blacks and women, for example being able to vote could and would have made a difference - which is exactly why they were not allowed to vote to begin with, e.g. suppression.

The United States is not intended to be a pure democracy. You're basically arguing against the existence of the federal judiciary. The Supreme Court has absolutely disallowed laws around things like segregation which were supported by a majority of people--whether nationally or at a relevant local level.

i agree that voting is another oldster NIMBY legacy tactic, and soon they will be swept away

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