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> Ezra Klein calls this “vetocracy”, rule by safety-focused bureaucrats whose mandate is to stop anything that might cause harm, with no consideration of the harm of stopping too many things. It’s worst in medicine, but everywhere else is catching up.

This really scares me. It seems like every important facet of American life that can be touched by increased, predatory, and superfluous litigation and regulation has. If we take Scott's word for it, this 'vetocracy' costs 10 000 lives a year due to IRB over-diligence, makes Bay-area housing completely unaffordable, reduces the quality of education, and so much more.

It really seems like our first priority as a nation should be to dismantle this 'vetocracy' and let researchers perform studies, and teachers teach.

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> It really seems like our first priority as a nation should be to dismantle this 'vetocracy' and let researchers perform studies, and teachers teach.

The housing is also really, really important: the Silicon Valley, San Francisco and New York etc are some of the most productive parts of your country. If more people were allowed to live there [0], your economy could grow a lot. A bigger economy directly translates to lives saved.

To give a simple example: your highway engineering people work with a value of life of something like x million USD. Any improvement to safety that costs less than x million USD per life saved gets implemented. The value of x gets set in vague relation to how rich society is.

[0] No any one individual is directly barred from moving to SF, if they pony up enough money for rent; but the NIMBY climate effectively sets a limit on the total number of people allowed to dwell there.

Location has almost nothing to do with the productivity of workers in Silicon Valley.

Okay, but then why do folks move there? My impression is that it’s mostly for work.

Companies mandate going to the office and remote work only became acceptable en masse after the pandemic?

Why would profit maximizing companies have those mandates, if location is not important?

Also: Google (for example) has offices in lower cost locations, too. Why do they keep the offices in Silicon Valley open at all, if location is not important?

If that's true there is no reason for Silicon Valley to exist in the first place.

But it does exist.

Im not much of english speaker so I wonder if my intuition is right here but its sounds like non sequitor. Why do You think there are no other possible scenarios which explains Silicon Valley existence? Like people herd mentality (even the high inteligent one are not resistant to it) or just simple power accumulation by few that make the decisions where to take up residency? With almost free capital and dollar as world reserve currency current Silicon Valley situation can be solvent by accident just long enough for people like You beliving it as not being irrational.

Google, Facebook, Apple etc already have offices in lower cost locations.

Why would they keep their high rent offices in Silicon Valley open?

Are you saying they decision makers are all irrational? They still have to compete in the market. Any company that could get equal productivity out of random locations could eat their lunch with a lower cost base.

> your highway engineering people work with a value of life of something like x million USD.

This is not currently nor should it ever be how civil engineering works.

You might like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_for_Health_... more. It's how the NHS decides what interventions to fund. (A similar idea was demonised in the US as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_panel )

Why do you think decisions _should_not_ be made like this? How else do you want decisions to be made?

https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...

Good luck finding any engineering project which uses this.

Engineering projects select their safety features based on what funding is available for which features in a given community. I'm sure there's someone in the federal government somewhere who thinks anyone uses VSL guidance, but that doesn't make it so.

There's probably nothing in modern history that hurts upward mobility and quality of life more than the disaster that is housing in western countries. Like most things it's a product of good intentions and previous winners using gov to kick the rug out for everyone else. The Bay Area is the classic example but this exists in urban (and increasingly suburban) areas in almost every wealthy western country: UK, Canada, Australia, etc.

The only major-changes that actually help are stuff like work arounds ala working from home or using AirBnB to offset mortgage costs.

I've read that the meme of "middle class is dead" is mostly bullshit, incomes have stayed consistent, the only major difference is cost of living, which housing ranks #1 by far.

Don't forget college. The [very good] public university I got my degree from in the 80s charged me about $180 per semester for tuition. The price now is $7500. That doesn't include books, housing, food, etc.

The US, the UK, Canada and Australia are all common law countries. Wealthy western countries that have administrative law, like Japan, Germany and France do not have this problem to the same extent.

That's an interesting point, I wasn't aware of that. I asked GPT to explain how this affects housing policy compared to the US and it does sound much better. Simpler processes based on clear sets of rules rather than complex caselaw, public participation is more limited and not imposed at every stage, and "there is typically a single permitting authority responsible for issuing permits and overseeing compliance, which can reduce bureaucratic obstacles and simplify the process for developers".

Some of these can be addressed without shifting this stuff to administrative law, but it's a good baseline.

And like the IRB there's historical precedent for the laws the previous winners use to freeze development. Before the creation of laws like NEPA and CEQA in the US, civil engineering projects would frequently lead to environmental issues. Before local control over housing became the norm, minority neighborhoods and shops were razed to accommodate highways. Now those laws are being weaponized to freeze development.

It’s not bullshit, it’s just more nuanced than that, as things often are.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/04/20/how-the-ame...

watch out for Chesterton’s Fence, though

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