Comment by Karrot_Kream | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Karrot_Kream | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The US has deindustrialized and since the rise of NIMBY politics hasn't built new industry in any scale at all. The first freeway revolts happened in 1959. In the meantime, basically everyone has agreed that industrial growth and manufacturing as an abstract concept is Good (TM) but definitely not in my backyard. For a long time these kinds of things were just being built in neighborhoods where the residents were too poor/politically disconnected to organize, but eventually that too became difficult.

Since automation became big in industrial processes, most industrial development has been labor-poor (few workers) but continues to be land intensive. That means while industry might generate tax revenue, it doesn't have a coalition of labor advocates willing to champion the capacity because not many jobs are created. So we find ourselves in 2026 with an inability to actually build new industrial capacity in any form. The anti-tech crowd is angry at the data centers, but the same exact thing is happening when it comes to permitting new power generation and transmission lines. In fact many of the concerns related to data center power usage could be allayed if we had more power generation but nobody wants power generation in their backyard.

For decades now the US has been dancing around the idea that there is no by-right way to build anything anymore, so building any new large structure becomes a collective action problem that just ends up failing. Even when things get built, costs are massive. This has even affected things that the US is ostensibly really good at making such as highways, as evident in the recent Texas highway expansions ongoing.

I think it's good to remind people that the industrial revolution was very close to never happening.

This is from Dud Dudley writing in 1665, whose own ventures to manufacture steel en masse before Abraham Darby succeeded.

> "I have been opposed by many adversaries, as by wood colliers, mine owners, and others who, being poor men, did, by misguided advice, throw down and destroy two of my furnaces and my works, and caused much of my pigs and bar iron to be carried away."

There were plenty of examples through history of "near-misses" where establishment land/wealth holders suppressed nascent steel industries. It was almost an accidental series of coincidences that the industrial revolution happened - the Glorious Revolution in England and Abraham Darby's secret financing network.

Fascinating quote and good point.

It should also be remembered that while the industrial revolution netted humanity enormous wealth and eventually a higher average standard of living, it also kinda sucked for the generations of working class living through it, prior to labor reform. Millions of people lived entire lives where the industrial revolution was nothing but bad for them and never saw the upside. So anybody opposing a new industrial revolution is not necessarily acting out of irrationality.

Kind of. I think the history is interesting here and complex.

One of the hard things to grasp is that the industrial revolution was preceded by an environmental collapse. Part of the reason there was a switch to coal (despite being seen as inferior to wood at the time) was massive depletion of wood in England and the high cost of importing not just timber but even just firewood.

Add this in to the enormously expensive wars England was fighting all through this period and stressed everything from labor and food supplies (which also triggered demand for steel and copper and brass) The industrial revolution happened against a backdrop of national crisis so it's hard to know what was being caused by the revolution and what the revolution was helping paper over.

And on top of this, when Engels and Marx wrote about the squalor and desperation of their time (which was very real), nearly a hundred years had passed and something much different was happening. Massive amounts of peasantry were being dispossessed of lands and forced into urban slums. Cities grew something like 10x in a single generation. This wasn't really the fault of the industrial revolution but because of really bad policy.

(BTW, this period in England when wages and quality of life backslid is now called "Engels' Pause" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engels%27_pause)

A very good, 100% true comment.

Now obviously sometimes new developments really are bad, or they're being targeted at terrible spots -- you don't want a very polluting factory right next to a residential neighborhood.

But we've overcorrected drastically. The rules should be sensible and out in the open; planning committees should only be checking whether companies and governments have followed the law as written, not listening to every single possible objection from neighborhood residents about a new apartment complex affecting street parking or creating shadows.

As I pointed out in another comment in this thread, a "neighborhood group" that's using environmental rules to block a low-cost, employee-owned grocery store being added to a site that was already basically a grocery store (Sam's Club) before, is an insane weaponization of the rules. Nobody who was writing these laws ever intended environmental protections to be misused like this.

This is an excellent analysis. The NIMBYism is pretty self-evident I think but I never thought about the disconnect automation may have caused between industry and advocates for industry.

>basically everyone has agreed that industrial growth and manufacturing as an abstract concept is Good (TM) but definitely not in my backyard. For a long time these kinds of things were just being built in neighborhoods where the residents were too poor/politically disconnected to organize, but eventually that too became difficult.

These NIMBY jerks have redefined the entire country to be their back yard

The NIMBYs were pissy that the poors were allowing industrial development said "those poor people are stupid and wrong for accepting the industry" and the legislated hoops so that they essentially have a "say" in what these poorer communities can allow.

They usually leverage environmental laws to do this stuff because the richer areas are already developed and paved to high heaven. They aren't doing greenfield development and the laws are construed to basically punish/prevent greenfield development and allow brownfield development and re-development. Of course, residential gets exemptions to all sorts of stuff so their ADUs and the kind of development they do are mostly unaffected but the industrial stuff out in the sticks is all but prevented.

I see this in my own city that's over an hour drive from the rich places. We want to allow manufacturing but the state will take our grant money if we don't have and enforce a ton of rules and process that make that prohibitive so basically no industry can afford to create a facility except the biggest of BigCos.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com