There's a reason we don't just "let the builders build". We used to do that (certainly to a massively greater extent than we do now), and the result was that although a few of them managed to construct monuments we can all be proud of, most of them built a pile of crap and/or damaged the places they built in and the people they nominally built for. This is true of literal buildings, but it's also true of a great many other things that we "build".
The author of this delightfully titled but almost content-free piece seems not to consider Chesterton's Fence at all: before you criticize let alone dismantle regulation, you should be able to demonstrate a sound understanding of why it came to exist in the first place. For bonus points, a rigorous explanation of why the reasoning no longer applies in the current time period is helpful. TFA provided neither.
I saw a photo exhibition [1] about the construction of the Bay Bridge once, containing many beautiful shots from the point of view of the workers. The photos were taken by Peter Stackpole, a 20 year old kid who basically just talked his way onto the boats that took the workers out to the site. He took photos of the towers as they were being riveted together, of the cables being wound. The photos are amazing and beautiful, but they show how dangerous the working conditions were.
When someone fell off and died, the workers would take the rest of the day off, but be back on the job the next day.
We don't accept that kind of risk anymore in the US, which obviously drives up construction costs. But it's hard for me to see that as a bad thing, and I bet that if you went and talked to the "builders" today, they'd prefer those costs to the ones we paid in the 1930s.
Was going to say this, human life was cheaper. It's quite worrying to see now a trend trying to praise this attitude as fearless workers, where as the ones we have now are all wimps, views usually espoused by people who have never, and will never work a job that could be dangerous
> by people who have never, and will never work a job that could be dangerous
It may be even worse. Quite often people that suffers from dangerous jobs will also support the situation as they fear the uncertainty of what change may mean. That a worker in a dangerous environment is willing to accept it to get food on the table does not mean that it is the right work environment.
But, of course, the main proposers of unsafe working environments is the people that gets the profit but does not share the risk.
Some people (mostly men) actually enjoy dangerous situations. Especially if there is a purpose for the danger. Look at all the people doing extreme sports. The military, police, and fire fighters are the main jobs left for people like that. There used to be a lot more.
Apropos of building suspension bridges, different people apprehend the danger of situations differently. I recognized this when I read that Alex Honnold doesn't like to be on ledges. When I climb, I love ledges and given about 12 inches of ledge I would host a party. But I never could climb without a belay the way Honnold does. I could never jam my fist into a crack in granite and just hang from it. ETA I don't have Honnold's talent.
Also I think when people are in a hard-core feed-my-family situation, they dig deep into their resolve, follow the safety rules, and avoid looking down.
> views usually espoused by people who have never, and will never work a job that could be dangerous
Have you ever been on a construction site, shipyard, pit mine, etc.?
They're stuck in the mud doing "everybody stand back" shit that isn't technically against the rules with a port-a-power because it's the least worst option and your ilk has the gall to come along and lecture that a 5-gal bucket isn't for standing on. It should come as no surprise that there's push-back.
More generally, the people who are actually subject to workplace injury are the ones complaining and they are not complaining about safety. They are complaining about you and your misguided attempts to "help" them. They are complaining that people like you saddle them with asinine policy that lacks nuance thereby making their jobs more difficult and less fulfilling than they were previously albeit marginally safer. Such policy routinely optimizes for reducing some trivially measurable source of danger while completely ignoring the fundamental dangers of the job. Policies like "no more box cutters", "no more step stools, step ladders for everything", "PPE all the time, even when everything is off and people are eating lunch" routinely come down the pipe from corporate HR or OH&S but you ask these types for a second truck crane or whatever to save everyone's back or a plasma cutter so gas cylinders don't need to be carted around as much and they act like you just threw a puppy into a wood chipper. No wonder these policies and their purveyors are held in low regard by the people on the ground.
Unfortunately, the people getting screwed are not necessarily the best versed in the ins and outs of organizational policy, management theory and whatnot so their complaints are not very well articulated. This brings us right back to the titular complaint of the article...
I'm sure many workers with dangerous jobs hate rules that only seem to make their work more difficult, especially if this seems to affect their income. Many of them presumably support Trump and others who want to dismantle these regulations, but this is unlikely to improve their situation. There's no reason why corporate HR would then suddenly decide to pay them more or prioritize a second truck crane.
Perhaps the workers themselves ought to be more involved in the processes for deciding new safety regulations, but the intuitions and common sense people have w.r.t. risk and safety can be quite inaccurate.
This has never not been true, capitalists or politicians have always been happy to send someone else to be injured or die to make themselves rich. The article in the OP is shockingly ignorant of how regulations come to be, which makes sense as the author is just another hopeful capitalist willing to throw us all in the fire if he can make a buck.
False dichotomy. Look at the delays and cost balloons of the HSR project. They have nothing to do with safety of workers.
You can adopt modern safety standards and still wipeout a ton of roadblocks to actually get started much sooner by just generally using eminent domain more freely and not empowering people to so easily stop projects with lawsuits.
Precisely! I saw an NDC Cooenhagen talk recently. I think it was called “Biggest mistakes in programming” or something like that. In the talk the guy mentioned at some point fixing a db problem.
The way he described it, he was contracted to describe the problem and provide guidance on how to fix it. Not to actually fix, just analyse and describe the solution. But the problem was so simple he just made the fix and offered to do it there and then. They didn’t accept that, they insisted on getting a report and steps to fix. So he does that. He sends them a document and doesn’t hear from them for a while.
Six months later, he gets an email “Can you please come over to discuss your findings?” The “discuss your findings meeting” he describes as being easily a £100.000 meeting.
All this could have been avoided if they just did the fix there and then. But there is a culture a bureaucracy and ass covering.
I have no doubt, this sort of thing is prevalent in other industries as well. It’s not always reasonable safety regulations. Often times it’s bureaucracy running in circles and driving up costs for no reason .
Probably there was a long history of people proposing fixes to this particular problem. While a specific technical issue was obvious to him, the problem was not understood at that level by those in charge. Those in charge also had far more to lose than he did by accepting the input of yet another expert on faith.
Chalking this up to pointless bureaucracy is in a sense the inverse of the “build it like that but six inches to the left” class of requests from non-technical stakeholders.
Indeed. Airlines do well, and they're heavily regulated. But they don't have armies of engineers doing nothing whilst court cases are worked out.
The flip side of that is monopoly. The only recent aviation accidents that have happened, have done so because, put bluntly, the FAA knows they didn't stand a chance if they blocked the only (US) big-jet maker from upgrading its planes. Were there (US) competitors, which once there were, they wouldn't blink at telling Boeing's transparently awful MAX design to go whistle.
That's not really true. The MAX issues were in large part a result of trying to keep the same type rating. An almost entirely artificial requirement generated by the FAA.
In an ideal world Boeing would have said this is the Max, it's slightly different and you need to do a little training to get used to the difference. But that means a new type rating which causes all sorts of operational headaches.
My understanding is what you are suggesting is how it works. The only question is how to measure "slightly different". FAA thought the differences were bigger than slightly and needed more than a little training. So Boeing tried to use software to paper over the differences.
This requirement was actually pushed on Boeing by Southwest. They insisted that the MAX not require training for their pilots, and with Southwest being a large 737 customer with other good options (A320), Boeing found a way.
Sure, but the article did not make this argument at all. It made zero effort to examine the current state of things and the various reasons and purposes behind it. It merely advocated for blowing it all up. If you want to make a convincing argument then you need to do more than ask for a return to a previous state totally ignoring the reasons we got to the current state.
It suggested no methods of preserving safety while also removing unnecessary roadblocks. It just suggested we should live with the "discomfort". I don't even think the author necessarily intended that. It reads to me as a combination of tunnel vision and poor communication. But the result is that the article comes off as mis-informed.
I think NASA vs SpaceX is a good example. The Artemis costs about 4 billion dollars each flight
The Artemis(/SLS) gets build in so many different states so everyone gets a bit of the pie, it seems mostly build by politicians, not by engineers or a general director.
Starship, which is similarly powerful and has more tonnage to carry only costs $240 million, which numbers will drop steeply if we do a lot of launches.
Both these numbers are somewhat speculative at this point, since neither has seen a successful orbital flight.
But I think your point is both correct and missing something. It's true that NASA is largely run by politicians (it's no accident that there are NASA Centers in major political states like Florida, Texas, Ohio, California, and Virginia). But conversely, there would be no SpaceX in it's modern form without NASA. They needed a customer willing to take a risk with big contracts on non-profitable ventures to initially fund their infrastructure and R&D. Their existence is symbiotic.
Well it’s interesting to see the comparison between risk averse / risk embracing which is kind of the topic here. Are there other areas where companies can be disruptive because of the foundation other “end game/risk averse/bound by laws” companies have laid?
It’s an interesting cycle and perhaps research to see how these things effect eachother?
I'll admit there is an argument about risk aversion of civil servants, but I don't think that's necessarily the issue at hand here.
NASA's implementation of different Center's actually addresses a risk that SpaceX doesn't have to necessarily consider (or at least to the same magnitude). Namely, it's meant to address political risk. NASA's missions almost always span multiple administrations, meaning they risk being defunded each election cycle. This is mitigated by spreading the political reward across multiple districts, who then have politicians with a vested interest in keeping those programs going. The downside of this is a lack of efficiency. Unlike SpaceX, NASA can't build up a single location to build and test rockets. If they did, there would be two Senators who want to keep it and likely 48 others who want it defunded in order to fund their own pet programs. So we have programs managed out of Ohio, tested in New Mexico, Mississippi, and California, funded out of Texas, and launched out of Florida.
I'd argue they aren't "risk adverse", but they mitigate a different set of risks. In any event, SpaceX can't be "disruptive" without the complicit help of the organization they are disrupting. It isn't really disruption, but a symbiotic relationship as intended. SpaceX actually gets to outsource a lot of their risk to the American taxpayer because their early (and major) customer (NASA) is self-insured. It's much easier to take on a lot of risk if somebody else is footing the bill.
I think a major risk to SpaceX that people don't really talk about is the bureaucratic quality risk. Right now, SpaceX doesn't have to meet the same requirements as an in-house NASA build. That allows them to streamline their efforts, but also implies an increase in risk. (Most requirements are a response to some risk). However, if any bad event happens like god-forbid they lose astronauts, you can bet additional requirements will be levied. This may really impact their "disruptive" advantage. Look at the example of their F9 strut failing in 2015. For some reason, SpaceX didn't levy supplier quality checks prior to the accident even though it's common practice in industry. Now, they do. The real question is if they were making risk informed decisions previously or just naïve.
> We don't accept that kind of risk anymore in the US, which obviously drives up construction costs.
It drives cost up for the building company, it drives cost way down for the community. Economy is not just one company but a complex interconnected system including all participants. It is the same case for dumping pollution into a river, it would be cheaper for the company to dump everything the closest possible but then other people is paying off for the loss of the river.
That's total misattribution of cause and effect. We could build that bridge today just as fast with no loss of life. We have tie offs, sensors, harnesses, automation, power tools, helicopters, better cranes, etc.
Look at the California high speed rail debacle. The reason for its lack of progress has zero to do with worker safety. They've barely even tried to do anything. It hasn't even gotten that far.
Our unwillingness to build housing has zero to do with worker safety. Few workers die or are seriously injured building houses in places where we still build houses.
The article here is right about the disease but wrong about the causes or the cure.
And with more unions and stronger unions than the US! Some people want to say unionization of some sectors is what makes US construction costs so high, but it really isn't because we can compare to other countries and see that it is possible to do things more cheaply while still maintaining a good level of worker benefits, and perhaps even more worker benefits.
Public construction is more expensive. I think private US construction cost are not nearly as out of alignment with other countries (once past the permitting phase of course).
I'd buy this argument so long as you actually sit down to do the math at hand. Did you add up the man years we now spend waiting on safety? How does that compare to the lives we saved waiting, or the money we spent doing so? I'm personally guessing a very large amount of the required waiting exists chiefly for bureaucratic needs, not human. How much of that extra 6T$ and 7 years went to saving lives in the first place? How many other lives could we have saved with it if we had it in hand?
In your mind how many man years of savings do you think is worth one human life? Let's say we can save half the time on a big project but periodically one random person is killed. Worth it?
I'm being glib here and/but/also we need to be talking about this directly. There's a spectrum of possible responses to the question and we need a language to discuss risk intelligently.
I think their point is that we can accomplish all the safety needs while only increasing costs and time so much, and that some portion (maybe big, maybe small) of that time is needless bureaucracy. They aren't advocating for more risk.
I think you're still missing the point. The goal isn't to eliminate any safety regulations. Those are needed and should be kept.
What's being addressed is the situation where various parties in politics, construction, or otherwise related in any way, looking at the project and saying "how can I get my hands on some of that money?". We're looking at all the lobbying that goes into for and against decisions, and how they stall process without any consideration of its purpose.
We're looking at every opportunity for a person or party to distract from the project for their own gain. If those can be removed or mitigated, we could potentially see faster and cheaper projects.
the people saying "how can I get my hands on more money" are usually (NB: not ALWAYS) the same ones seeking to eliminate regulations so that they can get their hands on more money
the regulations exist because everyone else thought that more safety was more important than those people getting richer
if you're talking about other regulations that "stall process", which ones specifically?
What is a safe workplace? Is it one in which we expect a workplace accident every year, decade, century, or millennium? The costs in terms of time, labor, and budget are not linear - that is money and man years that would be better spent elsewhere. The thing is that I think me mostly agree here as a society but most of these decisions are never actually decided in the first place.
Why do you think this is a bourgeois sentiment? Do you think the Proletariate never have their lives wasted, waiting endlessly because of safetyism or that the budgets that we devote to enforcing kafkaesque requirements wouldn’t better serve them put to productive use. If life is sacred, then it is just as immoral to waste it to no end as it is to end it via other means.
I'm fine with people dying during construction _if_ we foresee the deaths.
What I'm not fine with is killing people with lead/arsenic/asbestos/plastics because we didn't put new tech through it's paces before we deployed it en-mass.
We live in a world that is both too conservative and not anywhere near conservative enough.
That’s a very callous and detached way to consider human life.
It’s exactly the sort of thinking that led to the execution of the Ford Pinto. Wherein the bookkeepers determined that the number of deaths and cost of wrongful death settlements would be less than the cost of recalls to fix the fatal design error in the car.
The most American thing in the world is to worry about the 4 deaths per year caused by the faults in that car while ignoring the other 40,000 deaths a year caused by cars in general.
I’m not American, this is whataboutery and absurd to argue, everyone wants safer roads.
The example of the Pinto is famous worldwide; famous for the disgusting disregard Ford had for it’s own customers. That it would rather send its own customers to a painful death than have the decency to pay to fix the fault it was aware of, is abhorrent.
This behaviour resulted in a known unsafe product remaining on sale long after the fault was discovered - the people who died were not qualified to understand the additional risk the car had to it’s occupants.
>I'm fine with people dying during construction _if_ we foresee the deaths.
Because that's other people dying.
>What I'm not fine with is killing people with lead/arsenic/asbestos/plastics because we didn't put new tech through it's paces before we deployed it en-mass.
What worried me about it wasn't the fact I could lose a hand, but that more than half the chemicals we were getting smeared in daily weren't properly tested for their long term effects on humans.
Worse isn't the distinction, clarity of danger is. If your hands didn't get crushed at work that day then you can stop worrying about your hands when you go home. Not the case with whatever he was swimming in.
I find it pretty hard to believe "just letting workers die" was at all economically cheaper than having regulations in place to minimize that likelihood. The costs might be subsidised more heavily, but to just waste the years of training and effort that's put into ensuring we have skilled qualified workers (of any sort) is surely enormously expensive.
I suppose the more experienced (and more valuable I guess) knew most dangers and pitfalls and were better able to navigate amongst them. Some people also seem to be inherently more clumsy/likely to misstep/hurt themselves and they'd get sorted out sooner.
Not that that was any good, but I don't think enough builders died to make a difference in productivity.
I'd argue you're not really considering the total $ cost of an adult human being. I'm guessing many of those who have died during poorly regulated construction projects were relatively young too, so having invested heavily in nurturing workers to that point, the potential to capitalise on decades of productivity is lost.
I'd argue that they are, but that Rockefeller era capitalists were fine replacing workers that died, to whom they likely gave little training back then
perhaps you value workers more than they did? not that there's anything wrong with that
That's the mismatch though - the costs of raising/ educating/training them and most of the opportunity costs due to their premature death weren't borne by those responsible for their safety.
I don't think construction workers today would put up with someone in their ranks (construction crew on some big building) routinely dying and not strike for better conditions.
The article's first sentence, reads, "A few years ago, Silicon Valley was buzzing with the reverberations of Marc Andreessen’s epic essay, It’s Time To Build."
Here's the main point of "It’s Time to Build" regarding the failures in response to the covid pandemic: "Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t do in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to build."
The direct premise of this article is that our failure to build in the past is costing lives now and in the future. Im my opinion, many many more lives.
Regulatory oversight is not necessary for safety to improve over time. I think history shows that as technology advances and people's standard of living increases, people become more risk averse. General knowledge also increases over time, decreasing the proclivity for humans to put themselves in risky situations.
That trade off is deeply flawed. Future lives saved are impossible to quantify, while lives saved now very much are. But argueing to sacrifice / risk lives now for the benefit of saving lives later, all you do is arguing to get of regulations holding you back right now from making personal gains. And that line if thought is just selfish, entitled and short sighted. And quite prevelant in certain, especially rich and powerfull circles, unfortunately. But after those lives risked now aren't the rich and powerful ones.
> Future lives saved are impossible to quantify, while lives saved now very much are.
The point of regulation(in this context) is to preserve future lives. If future lives saved is impossible to quantify and that somehow invalidates the idea of less regulation, would it not therefore invalidate the idea of regualtion as well?
> But argueing to sacrifice / risk lives now for the benefit of saving lives later, all you do is arguing to get of regulations holding you back right now from making personal gains.
There is a concept called "Regulatory Capture". The idea is that businesses argue for regulation of their own industry in order to increase the cost for their competitors. This ensures their own survival. Many regulations in fact, serve merely to increase the personal gains of corporate shareholders. I certainly am not arguing for my current personal gain, but for the general welfare and the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. I do not own any stock or business.
>If future lives saved is impossible to quantify and that somehow invalidates the idea of less regulation, would it not therefore invalidate the idea of regualtion as well?
no, since the causality of regulation saving lives is more direct, obvious, and convincing than the causality of less regulation saving lives
the people holding the latter view would need to come up with a convincing argument explaining how less regulation saves more lives than more regulation, ideally specifying the regulation they wish to eliminate
Zoning regulations mostly hurt the poor, even if lifting them would directly make profit for real estate developers.
That said there is a big difference between zoning and EPA regulations.
The only interesting thing in this article/blogpost is the 30 day limit of prop H.
It's a good thing. Every kind of bureaucracy should have cost-benefit analysis integrated into it. It's ridiculous that government agencies can decide critical things about people's lives but the decision framework is totally arbitrary.
> It's ridiculous that government agencies can decide critical things about people's lives but the decision framework is totally arbitrary.
Arguably that's what we elect governments to do. And if they're doing a bad job of it, they get voted out. Obviously it's not a very fine grained system and there's an argument for a constitutional requirement for legislation to be reviewed periodically but that carries the risk of even more bureaucracy and effective regulation being repealed for ideological/partisan reasons rather than any sort of evidence based analysis.
I was sloppy in my phrasing, I mean building approval/permitting. A bunch of local delegates are required to meet to have a new simple building (whatever the neighborhood a bit bigger denser is simple)
erected? And we are surprised that housing costs are outpacing inflation?
"urbanization" is ongoing for decades and density is not the default? and people are surprised that suburban sprawl is the result?
But areas with higher densities tend to have more regulation than those without, so I'm not sure what your argument is? I totally agree suburban sprawl is the really of poor government policy but I'm less convinced it's an issue of building permits being overly restrictive. It's not hard to envisage high levels of regulation that are designed to make sprawl unprofitable - e.g. a maximum distance between residences and retail/industrial developments or PT facilities, or even regulation that prevents provision of ground-level parking etc.
My argument is that those areas would be even denser, more walkable, would support more people, better infrastructure (thanks to more people bearing the costs, plus economies of scale). Would be even more engines of wealth generation, would benefit more people overall.
Regulations are obviously necessary to coordinate large populations with some decent throughput, but they need to be optimized for legibility, efficiency. (Eg. self-service portals, understandable - easily human computable - conditions, the less need for domain experts for regular business as usual things, the more transparent and standardized the decision making of bureaucracy is, the less waste there is in the coordination system.)
Therefore for housing, which is as basic a function as it gets, ought to be as easy to add more as it can be. Eg. copy paste an existing building.
>That trade off is deeply flawed. Future lives saved are impossible to quantify, while lives saved now very much are.
Actually both are "future lives" (we're not saving someone we already know is about to die) and both are as easy or hard to quantify.
We can quantify average cost of lives in a big building project given X regulations applied (based on past experience with similar projects), and we can also quantify the impact of a project in first (and sometimes second) order effects (e.g. "building this highway bypass means X less traffic and congestion in that populated area, and thus X man-years spared, plus X less pollution").
They are in no way equivalent in relative ease to quantify. Safety Regulations exist to protect from "known" harms. It is the result of learning from our past and applying that knowledge to our present and future. But anything in the unknown harms category is fundamentally unquantifiable. We know there are unknown harms out there. But we don't know
1) What they are
2) When they can happen
3) How many they could affect
You can't make decisions that help you avoid harms in that category. But you can make decisions in the other category. There is an argument that failing to build is for example in a category of known harms now. But so are a whole host of harms that we encountered to get where we are now. The trick is to make it easier to build while not also engaging in the rest of the known harms out there.
>But anything in the unknown harms category is fundamentally unquantifiable
The "unknown harms" exist in workplace deaths. In fact many of them come from such factors. It's not just things like "asbestos is bad to work with, you need a face mask and other protection" or "construction debris might fall, workers need to wear a hard hat" and such, but also things like materials breaking under unforseen circumstances, unforseen disasters like earthquakes and fires while on the job, and more...
> Regulatory oversight is not necessary for safety to improve over time.
You couldn't be more wrong.
> I think history shows that as technology advances and people's standard of living increases, people become more risk averse. General knowledge also increases over time, decreasing the proclivity for humans to put themselves in risky situations.
Except complexity increases faster than knowledge. It's flat out impossible for everyone to have full knowledge of all the risks that might be generated by people trying to make a buck by cutting corners on safety, and what you'd have to do to avoid those risks. And that's not even mentioning how risks can affect other people who never made a choice about them.
Complexity increasing faster than general knowledge may be true, however, it is much easier for me to do assess safety with a search online for "death rate of copper vs coal miners" than it was in less complex times.
General knowledge has made people aware of complexities that warrant some investigation or questioning, before participating.
it is easier for you to assess safety with a search online than it was decades ago, it may be true, but complexity increases faster than general knowledge (much less specific knowledge), thus outweighing that
imagine having to become an absolute expert in cars and mechanics before buying a car, so you know of every possible corner that can be cut manufacturing a car and can check on it
or the same for construction when dealing with contractors you hired: now you need to know everything about construction to not get screwed
>Regulatory oversight is not necessary for safety to improve over time.
Doesn't this neglect the deaths in the short term? If we remove all speed limits and safety regulations on cars, there will likely be a spike in deaths. Maybe there will be enough public sentiment to change that, but there will be a lag that creates an awful lot of death in the near term.
(I'd also argue that regulation is one of the main mechanisms the public exerts such demands, because there is a natural asymmetry in market power between a manufacturer and a collection of individuals)
yes, it's a very cynical argument along the lines of "abolish the FDA and people will learn how to deal with food and drugs that negligently cause death
we did find a way to deal with it, it's regulation. if the regulation is too slow, fund more people doing the work.
In Switzerland, arguably the world's experts in tunnel-boring, one death per tunnel kilometer is considered acceptable (and it is often less than that).
The much easier Channel tunnel has had around one death per five kilometer.
The Japanese Akashi Kaikyo Bridge prominently has had no construction deaths, which was considered extraordinary at the time. The Humber Bridge, which was the longest suspension bridge before Akashi Kaikyo, did cost four lives.
Construction is a dangerous business. You operate heavy machinery. You move large amounts of heavy material. You deal with power tools. Death is always a possibility - and that's something we IT folks tend to forget in our clima-controlled environments with our cozy desks and expensive chairs.
The US Death Rate per Capita is about .8%, so let's start there.
How many is it acceptable to die on the job? Well, there's hard stats on that - About 1M people work in construction[1], and about 1000 of them died on the job last year[2]. That'd be about .1% death rate on the job. Is that good enough? Probably not, but it's where we're at and what society accepts.
If 2,000 people worked on the Golden Gate Bridge for five years, it'd be an average construction project. It was a massive undertaking, but apparently poorly documented - There's no record of worker counts[1], but we do know the number of deaths - 11, of which 10 were from a single failure of a gantry.
Obviously more than zero, else we wouldn't attempt to build any bridge (or do anything else, like drive cars or fly planes) lest someone dies in the process...
What's acceptable (i.e. It's ok if 1 person dies on this project) is different than what's the potential risk (i.e. There is a risk that 1 person might die on this project).
If you're working on a project and 5 people have died so far and you've still got a lot more to do I think it's pretty reasonable to expect that more people will die. So, if you're going to continue the project you're considering it acceptable that somebody else will die as well.
Sure, you shut it down for awhile and then just let it start back up again and after the next death shut it back down and rinse-repeat. If it was the 1930s you wouldn't have to bother taking the break in between deaths but the rinse-repeat means we have a non-zero tolerance for death.
if 5 people have died the same way so far, modern workers would not find it acceptable that more of their friends will die from the same unaddressed cause before the building is done, and thus would not, in fact, continue the project until something is done about it.
And further there are trade offs. I don't know the trade offs of bridge building is but the example i've heard in the past is, it's possible we could make it so no one ever dies in a plane crash. To do that with today's tech might make flights cost 2x, 3x, 4x more. Flights cost more = more people choose to drive (say SF to LA or LA to Vegas or DC to NYC). More people drive = more deaths.
That isn't to say you shouldn't make things safer but you have to take into account is your change a net positive over all. I have no idea what the trade off is for bridges. The bridge arguably increase commerce which means its completion created jobs. Poverty is a top killer of people so more jobs = less death.
That said, one thing I'm happy to see on construction sites, at least for buildings, they put up fences on every floor so it's harder to fall out. My guess is that really only became possible when they could create the fences out of plastic.
I think plane crashes are not a good example of your point. Every time a crash happens, a massive post Mortem tends to occur to determine what needs to be done such that that specific failure mode will never happen again. Pilots have checklists on checklists on checklists that they must tick off during each procedure of the flight, with each point written in the blood of previous crashes. There isn’t discussion generally as to whether or not adding new checklists, the two pilot system, or other safety improvements as a result of this would make flights more expensive: hell, an entire new model of plane was taken completely out of the skies during a recent investigation as to a fucked up sensor.
Plane crashes might have improved but plane flights have not. I'm old enough to remember flying in the 90s. I'd be willing to play Russian roulette if I could show up 15 minutes before an international flight today and still make it on the plane.
You could also make commuter driving (near) zero-death now. It would be a huge one-off payment for a national - possibly international - navigation and power grid. But once built it would be a huge cost saver, because automated traffic flows could be optimised across the entire system.
Although in fact remote work would be even better, for those jobs that support it.
Meanwhile jobs have become poverty traps, so they're not enough on their own to avoid poverty and death.
Ultimately it's not about building things or the cost of highly visible prestige projects. It's about systemic rather than fragmented thinking. Capitalism tends to the latter, because an airy wave of the invisible hand is supposed to somehow optimise everything.
This is magical fantasy. If you want intelligent culture-wide systems you have to get your best people to design and build them. And they have to consider long-term systemic outcomes as much as short-term goals and projects.
This culture is very, very bad at that. But it's also unrealistically convinced it's very good at it.
I believe you will not come to an agreement with those that find that the opposite is true (‘let builders build’) because ultimately it boils down to one’s outlook on life and what we deem important (‘our value system’).
By arguing in favour of regulation, you have a set of assumptions and expectations that support your view. For example, in the literal case of buildings, you might be thinking of rent-seekers and greedy fly-by-nights that build low cost housing in high rises that collapse years later (for example).
I could argue, these were never builders to begin with. They are copying something (very unoriginal) which doesn’t count as building, but is rather a very good example of entropy (of an initial good idea perhaps).
Those builders who really build, as in create, they are precious and rare, and only bloom in an environment of less regulation.
It is one of those many contradiction in life where you have to let the failures through to allow for something new and novel to emerge.
I believe that we owe our own existence to this principle, where evolution was a very wasteful process of many dead ends in terms of life forms that emerged from it but could not persist.
If evolution had been “conservative” I guarantee you intelligent life would not have emerged.
Transfer this principle to the evolution of ideas, or rather, creations, we will also stagnate ourselves into a dead end with our civilisation if the “regulators” ever get the upper hand.
(I am not saying they don’t have a purpose or should not exist; merely that they need to be balanced by the ‘chaotic creators’)
You start with a truism/No True Scotsman, then overlay a theory of everything without any evidence to suggest how construction deaths Are comparable to natural selection.
I don’t disagree with you - but it would be worth revisiting how you make this argument. You took all this time to write a nice comment! & here I am, criticizing it, but I think you may need some refinement.
I think, like you said, the comment needs refinement, but I get the point.
Basically, if you lean against regulation, clever/imaginative/quality building will flourish, but the price you have to pay is that cheap/shoddy building will flourish, too.
The problem for me is that even though I can see the tradeoffs associated with regulation, it's difficult to determine where to set the regulatory "dial." And even if I could set that metaphorical dial with confidence, not everyone will agree with me. :-(
I’d say that that these two opposites (regulation vs. freedom to just create) will always exist side by side.
We tend to argue for one or the other and hope that a clean ideology will emerge from it because it makes our understanding of life so much simpler.
But if I continue my way of argumentation, I’d say this ‘pulling of opposites’ is a built-in feature of our existence. The really smart outcomes emerge out of the tension that exist between these opposing ‘forces’.
In the case of my evolution example, the two opposing forces are life on the one hand, and death (or the non-living environment), on the other.
Very abstract, I know. But this world view has been expressed by at least one thinker who formulated this ‘natural law’ if you might call it that: Henno Martin in this book (I couldn’t find an English translation): https://www.amazon.com/Menschheit-auf-dem-Pr%C3%BCfstand-Men...
> it's difficult to determine where to set the regulatory "dial."
I think about this a lot and have come to this thought: you - specifically - won't get to set the dial at all.
Too many political philosophies completely ignore the other for the sake of a perfect solution. This framing of a knob to dial extended imagines a whole switchboard of regulations that can be tuned or turned off. The Democracy video games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_(video_game)) use this metaphor as their core game mechanic.
But the reality is that the Other(s) gets to act during and in response to your actions.
All this is to say that if politics is setting a knob on a control panel with a precise tuning in mind, reality is an annoying rodent running behind the panel and swapping wires with reckless abandon.
Perhaps biological population macro models make sense - let things bloom, then cull the ones that don't meet societal goals. Regulation is the pruning factor, in great times, things bloom but the critical work is aligning the pruning shears with goals.
This perspective implies there is no right setting across time - the variance between permissive and restrictive is the value.
Others have commented on the other fallacies in your post but you say
>If evolution had been “conservative”
When has evolution not been conservative? Tiny changes over the span of generations is certainly not liberal or radical. It took what, hundreds of thousands of years if not more for us to evolve into Homo sapiens and develop intelligence.
You are thinking human timescales. The sheer diversity of mindboggling lifeforms that exist and have existed have been everything but conservative. And also very wasteful/destructive.
Goalposts. You specifically mentioned intelligent life, which is dealing on human timescales.
You mention wastefulness and destruction which only makes me think of humanities actions in causing extinctions, caused by our lack of regulation or something synonymous.
There's also a certain irony in looking favourably at the building speed and cost of an era when Depression labour oversupply could get a bridge built quickly and cheaply (with only 11 construction deaths!) but the longstanding invention of running water didn't find its way into grandma's house until well into the second decade of her life. And even people with running water saw it collected straight from the same rivers untreated waste was dumped into until the era of regulation.
In that sense, the history of smartphones looks a bit more impressive than that of running water...
>but the longstanding invention of running water didn't find its way into grandma's house until well into the second decade of her life.
His point still stands, as it would go went beyond the fifth or more decade of her life and cost 10x more if we had to lay such pipes, build the original dams, etc, from scratch, today. And that's even considering todays advanced technical means...
Would it? New houses always get indoor water supplies when they're built in the developing world, even if it's a new suburb in the middle of nowhere (those pesky regulators usually force it!). And it certainly doesn't take property developers fifty years to build.
Of course, building houses without utilities was quicker still, if you wanted to make that tradeoff...
Spoken like someone who's never had to carry all their daily water from a well.
Even if you can't drink tap water the fact that you don't need to carry the water for washing, bathing, cleaning, watering, etc. etc. etc. is an amazing improvement in quality of life.
Spoken like someone who didn't read the comment properly, or at all.
Building a big red bridge quickly isn't that much of a testament to the ability of people in the 30s to get stuff done if people in the 30s also spent their entire childhood drinking dirty well water because in many parts of the US people hadn't got around to implementing the ancient technology of piped water
Not going to lie, I'd pick the society where taps are standard but a bridge might take a long time to build over the one where the bridge building progresses more quickly but you'll be waiting 15 years to get a tap and need to boil what comes out of it.
There's a difference between flowing piped water, which is a technology as old as Rome, and static piped water, something that was figured out only in the 20th century.
Water towers and pumping were not twentieth century technologies (and nor were water closet toilets and sewerage). London had steam-pumped water supply two-hundred years earlier, and those pesky regulators forced every multi-storey building in NYC to have them during the 19th century. Piped water wasn't the future in the 1930s, it was just unevenly distributed.
I've carried water occasionally in the past - aside from hiking trips my grandfather built a summer house without running water.
I would prefer to have clean rather than just running water, since the latter is useless when contaminated.
There's a stream close to where my grandfather built the house. We never used water from there because it was too rich in iron, even though it's more accessible since you don't have to pull the bucket out like in a well.
>Just because it's an amazing thing which without life would be more difficult doesn't necessarily make it a good or amazing innovation.
Actually it does. That's the very definition of a "good or amazing innovation".
It might not be technically involved or some deep use of science and physics and such, but it's definitely a good AND amazing innovation.
Aside from the huge quality of life improvement it brought, it was also a huge productivity boost (all those wasted domestic hours plus also the boost to agriculture, and industrial uses) AND a huge quantity of life improvement (early "low hanging fruit" like running water saved millions of lives).
>But in terms of innovation or technical level they are far away from a cell phone.
Which is irrelevant.
We don't create stuff for the "innovation in technical level" alone, but for the improvement in our daily lives. And life was perfect livable (if not more so) 1992, before everybody had cellphones. Much less so before running water.
If "technical innovation" alone mattered, we'd be building ever more complex Rube Goldberg machines. That's for the people who appreciate an IoT washing machine because "it has more technology, man", even though functionality wise it's the same as a regular one (if not worse, due to more complex UI and failure points).
OP complained about that things don't move fast enough. It's like development has slowed down.
My argument is that developing a cell phone is way more difficult and complex than some other old inventions. Even though one can argue forever which innovation is most valuable.
Indeed. As the saying goes, legislation is often written in blood.
Like how the Triangle fire led to a rule that "you can't lock all the exits of a building, even if you're worried your workers will take unauthorized breaks".
There are two kinds of regulations: "don't hurt other people for your own benefit", and "do something that is theoretically helpful ignoring the cost/benefit to the people it helps" like adding safety features.
> Chesterton's Fence at all: before you criticize let alone dismantle regulation, you should be able to demonstrate a sound understanding of why it came to exist in the first place
It's not the individual regulations themselves, it's the mass of regulations that's slowing things down. I'm sure SF has a ton of regulations around building housing. You can point to each rule and give a very good reason for why that rule is there. In fact you can go through the entire list of hoops developers go through the justify every single hoop.
And now you have an apartment building that's built to the standards that everyone agrees on, except there's just one problem, no one can afford it.
And that's the larger issue. All these regulations individually and on the surface to a service to the community by making sure that X or Y edge case never comes up. But they do arguably a massive disservice to the community by driving away affordable housing and business.
> I'm sure SF has a ton of regulations around building housing.
Which only affect those builders who keep wanting to build in San Francisco. Just go and build somewhere else, that's the entire point of San Francisco regulation!
> massive disservice to the community by driving away affordable housing and business.
I don't agree with you. SF regulations are working exactly fine for SF community: they are preventing the population density from increasing, and that in itself is a very valuable outcome.
"Somewhere else" but not in South SF or Millbrae or Belmont or Redwood City or Atherton or Palo Alto or Mountainview or San Jose. Because while other towns and cities in the Bay Area might not all be quite as bad as SF, they all still impose extremely limits on building anything. And what's the point of building something in the middle of the desert, away from anyone who might benefit from it?
> Which only affect those builders who keep wanting to build in San Francisco. Just go and build somewhere else, that's the entire point of San Francisco regulation!
Builders are building elsewhere, and that is precisely the problem. The lack of construction in the city is the main reason for the sky high COL there.
EDIT: You know I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not.
Right. The point of the regulation is to empower evil people to do an evil thing. That’s bad. Such powers shouldn’t exist in the first place, but especially ought to be revoked once they are found to be abused in this way. And fortunately, the State of California is working on it.
Is that the purpose of the regulation, or a side effect that some happen to be content with? I'd have thought there would be better tools for the purpose of limiting throughput.
> seems not to consider Chesterton's Fence at all: before you criticize let alone dismantle regulation, you should be able to demonstrate a sound understanding of why it came to exist in the first place
This should probably be amended to “you should be able to demonstrate that you took reasonable measures to investigate why it came to exist in the first place.” Otherwise you’re likely to select for regulations whose reasons for existing are convoluted or even deliberately obfuscated.
Indeed. I was an elected official for a hyperlocal committee years ago. There was a specific hoop that our committee required people to do, but when I looked into it I found that none of the other dozens of committees had it, and it required people to waste time doing things the city was already doing. Keep in mind that our boundaries would change every year, so whether or not a block of houses had to comply with our regulation depended on if they happened to fall into our jurisdiction that year.
When I suggested to the chair that we shouldn't do this anymore, his response was simply "but that's what we've always done." The older people on the committee, who had been there for decades, often engaged in antisocial behavior (lying, calling other committee members in the middle of the night to complain about things) including purposefully wasting time (trying to get committee members to go to trainings for tech we didn't use, stretching out committee meetings with things that were supposed to be handled before even after repeated warnings).
I think of this experience whenever someone invokes Chesterton's fence, and have to wonder how much experience people have with some of these organizations.
Imagine how much time we would waste if we applied it to ideology - you can't dismiss any weird conspiracy theory (and many conspiracy theorists have a _lot_ of information they'll throw at you) or ramblings of schizophrenics on the street until you have a sound understanding of their theories. Most people would think that's a terrible way to go about life, one where you either waste all your time with the most unhinged elements of society or accept their beliefs as holding as much weight as anyone else's. What people often fail to realize is that unhinged people also exist in bureaucracies, and deciding that you'll let all of their actions remain until you fully understand them is a terrible approach. So bad, I'd argue it's a dereliction of duty, surrendering regulations to the most inscrutable nutcases (you won't ever be ever to understand them, so in theory you would have to let all their actions remain).
This doesn't mean mindlessly get rid of all regulations, but you need to take a measured approach that deals with the world as it exists, and not pretend we live in an imaginary utopia where every action has a well reasoned and easily identifiable justification.
I'll also note that he begins his piece by approvingly quoting Shakespeare's "Dick the Butcher," one of the henchmen of Jack Cade and a symbol of the descent of England into anarchy and mob rule; in the play, Cade is basically a Kentish Pol Pot and Dick his thuggish enforcer, who gleefully executes anyone who can read and write (instead of being illiterate like "an honest, plain-dealing man"). Maybe not the most felicitous opening -- but, then, he does essentially advocate for the overthrow of the regulatory state so we can "fearlessly build" with "permissionless innovation" ... Uber. And sidewalk scooters.
The costs of doing things the slow way as we do now hugely outweigh the benefits. Yes, buildings fall down less but they're so much more expensive that if you detregulated and put that money in healthcare you'd save an order of magnitude more lives than you lose.
A big factor is the costs of regulation and the fragility of innovation are both hugely underestimated. Every little form or permission slip is massively more costly than it would intuitively seem (though those who work improving BtC sales pipelines probably have a good feel for how much a little thing can deter someone from completing a sale).
"Yes, buildings fall down less but they're so much more expensive that if you detregulated and put that money in healthcare you'd save an order of magnitude more lives than you lose." And
"Every little form or permission slip is massively more costly than it would intuitively seem"
Genuinely interested, do you have any sources for this economic analysis?
The former can be mostly done by comparing building costs and fall down rates 100 years ago to now and then plugging in the NICE HALY figures (they will pay for treatment that gives >=1 year per £30k IIRC) to see how many lives you could save. An order of magnitude was probably hugely understating things.
The latter is something I've seen a mountain of evidence on (from personal life, corporate life (all they needed to do was click on a link and fill out three fields... but no....) and various stats such as reduced application rates per page of forms and big changes in completion rates with extra fields) but don't have a good reference. :(
Beware Trivial Inconveniences is kinda related I guess.
Clearly there is a middle ground. Japan has this problem too, with real estate. So they reformed their zoning and permitting laws to make building easier, and it worked. Housing prices came down, and the negative effects were minimal.
Once upon a time, during the Lochner era, it was almost impossible to regulate in the US. While that environment had advantages, it clearly had many downsides. Since then, we have overcorrected, and made it too easy to regulate. We need to pull things back a little.
Regulation operates like a ratchet - it's easy to add, but hard to remove, both due to the lobbying/entrenched interests that benefit from it, and the optics of one obscure accident blown out of proportion after some safety rule is removed. Not even getting to the PR and corruption aspects when it's first introduced - I mean, look at congress under either party.
I think that should be the default assumption; that a given regulation was added because of corruption and PR. There needs to be rigorous explanation on why it's needed; frankly if I could go back in time and magically change the Constitution in some way I'd try to engineer a practical sunset rule that would require all laws and regulations on all levels to expire in a few years and be re-voted-upon (the part where re-voting on many laws might prevent adding more laws is by design).
I feel like there's some sort of a trade-off bias involved here - like when people mistakenly assume that if someone is smart they are not sociable or if someone is beautiful they must be dumb. Most countries are capable of building stuff cheaper, with less rules and far less workers (the latter even applies in Europe). "Oh well but it's less safe". But is it? Does anyone measure that? The buildings and bridges in China don't appear to fall down any more often than in the USA.
Arguendo, just look at the inflated costs of infrastructure he mentions. Well above inflation, well above even our European counterparts who have good unionization benefits, environmental concerns, and still manage to decently respect archeology and work within centuries old city plans. Why can't America build anymore? We weren't a toxic wasteland of robber barons and immigrant 16 hour a day labor 30 years ago. Not even 40 or 50.
It's telling that one of the examples given supporting the case was Marc Andreessen who, along with his wife, recently led a NIMBY revolt against a housing project in their posh town. Let them build, indeed.
I mean, this is purely libertarian populism. Someone quoting “Uber cultural values” should be a dead giveaway that they have no damn idea what they’re talking about.
aesthetic is defined by the wealth of people living in them. Rich people change decrepit areas to expensive urban centers. Medieval italian cities must have looked like crap, literally, with all the dung in the streets, but look at them now. And venice was not all palaces when it started.
american cities were optimzed for the car, but what about now that the car is receding and business districts will cease existing? Organically-grown cities adapt better to the passage of time
Unspoken and underlying the author's entire worldview seems to be, "the more new things, the better," a not uncommon tunnel view in the engineering world. The purpose of regulation, ideally, is to ensure that whatever activity/process is being regulated is worth the cost(s) for the majority of people. Defining those terms and making that decision is precisely the job of regulators, who are ideally accountable to a democratic base. In the worldview where all that matters is "growth," people suffer. Running water is a huge quality of life win for EVERYONE. If you ask most people what would really help make their lives better, it's not gonna be colonizing mars, building tunnels under LA, whatever, it's gonna be access to resources we already have. Healthcare, clean water, clean air...perhaps we should think more about engineering as it can be applied to expanding access, and not so much to "making new things," which most people don't need or care at all about.
Not to mention that giving healthcare, clean water and clean air to people who don’t have it will increase “growth” in long term, probably more than anything new.
Is access to these resources really an engineering problem, rather than a matter of political fact? The people with the power to expand access, politicians, don't have any real incentive to.
It's definitely a political problem more than any other, yes. What would give politicians more incentive to operate this way would be real campaign finance reform. Check out represent.us
I would argue that its an engineering/technology problem at heart. If access to those things was easy and cheap politicians would have no/less incentive to hold it back. It's probably not the same if it's a limited and restricted resource.
If we had more people trying to optimize food production, water distribution, Healthcare scaling and management etc, those things would become materially better, fast.
But we are more concerned with optimizing ads so we can buy shit we don't need so..
Underlying the political will to do something would be the implementation of that thing. To continue the running water example, you can imagine many technical challenges to distributing fresh water to the parts of the world that don’t already have it.
This undoubtedly needs talented engineers across the disciplines, definitely not just software.
>>> it's not gonna be colonizing mars, building tunnels under LA, whatever, it's gonna be access to resources we already have. Healthcare, clean water, clean air...
This exactly ... incremental improvements on existing infrastructure, increasing access etc would benefit more people than big bang, sexy stuff like hyperloop.
Let's be clear about one thing: The hyperloop was intended to cast suspicion on infrastructure investments, primary rail. Who knows what will happen in the future? Maybe low pressure tubing will rule and no one will use rail? Then your investment will be for naught!
It's an age old method, the same as used in telecom to justify not spending on fiber infrastructure. Who knows what will happen in the future? Maybe wireless? Look at this idea what a future wireless service might bring!
(Completely ignoring the fact that fiber is what drives economy and innovation. Wireless is just a question of capex, if the fiber is already in place. Quite similar to how low pressure tubes have physical limitations that makes it unrealistic to replace rail.)
This is not only an obvious observation by now, as Musk has been pretty clear about what risks he saw with rail investments, particularly in California but also across the country.
> It's an age old method, the same as used in telecom to justify not spending on fiber infrastructure. Who knows what will happen in the future? Maybe wireless? Look at this idea what a future wireless service might bring!
With SpaceX's immediate success in becoming a global ISP, this turned out to be true.
New was good because humans needed many things (that were new at this point). Now that we got almost everything we need, "New" is no longer good on its own.
Humans did not “need” things they lacked, and live to tell about it. Every age could see itself as complete. We’re fortunate that it took until the mid 20th century to freeze everything in amber. Unfortunately, the mid 20th century left us some really problematic stuff that wouldn't pass regulatory scrutiny today - like car dependence - and now we can't get rid of it.
Except in practice regulation increases cost and reduces access, particularly of anything new. Regulation has made building so difficult in the UK that oligopolies have formed and 90% of the young will never be able to buy a house unless they inherit.
Personally I blame Right to Buy for the collapse in building new homes, as this graph [1] neatly illustrates; Local authority building collapses, Housing association building is a trickle by comparison. Private housebuilding has remained relatively stable since 1955 by comparison.
The financial crisis also has a notable effect, but it's small by comparison.
The cost of housing is fuelled mainly by lack of social rented supply, and the high cost of land with planning permission. It's also to some extent a consequence of political service to the baby boomer generation, who got high house building when they needed it, had the heyday of BTL and have constrained house building since to preserve the value of their investments. The size of houses is decreasing [2] and I can't find a source for it, but certainly anecdotally plot size is decreasing too. The young are paying more for less.
House size decreasing makes sense as people become more urban.
Everything else you said is exactly spot on though.
It was regulations intentionally written to make the rich richer and keep the poor poor that caused the issue. It wasn't a mistake, or an unintended effect of the nanny state going too far, quite the opposite.
The reason I mentioned it as such is that it's not really regulation, as much as the effects of the right to buy policy causing the public sector to stop building houses; reversing this wouldn't really be 'deregulating' but would actually be involving government to address a market failure.
The original idea of right to buy, as discussed by Labour, in the late 70s was to reinvest the money from sales in building new council houses.
The Tory policy implementation sold them off cheap and slowly ratcheted down the amount of the sales price going to that purpose and the building dramatically slowed. Again, not an accident or unintended effect.
Basically bribing the better off council house owners into voting conservative (and for policies that cause the housing crisis) at the expense of the poor.
It sounds callous, but even if those 72 deaths could be attributed to regulation on houses (they can't, that's apartment blocks), it would still be an acceptable price to pay. It costs less than a million to save a marginal life, housing regulations have cost north of a trillion (comparing total cost of housing stock then to now adjusted for inflation), so unless those regulations have saved a million lives? They aren't worth it.
Humans are really bad at thinking at scale, but this is essential for good pubkic policy.
So you are splitting hairs by, after the fact, by distinguishing between "houses" and "housing"; making up numbers of what regulations cost (not the same as the total cost of housing, right?) and insisting that fireproof cladding just isn't worth it in purely monetary terms.
> is to ensure that whatever activity/process is being regulated is worth the cost(s) for the majority of people
Ideally yes but in reality it ends up being a way for trolls to hang out under bridges and take their cut or to block new things to protect existing interests.
Is more housing in the best interest of the majority of people? Public transit? High speed rail? Better energy systems?
Totally agree. I think the issue here though is not with regulation itself, but with corrupting influence that we as constituents allow to infiltrate our regulatory bodies. I'd hope campaign finance would help solve this issue too – harder to pull a " Greg and Co. gave me $x so I'll appoint Greg jr. to this sweet regulatory position where he will inevitably act in his self-interest" kind of thing if the public has full view of Greg and Co.'s campaign contributions in the first place...
Did you miss the part where exactly these things suffer the most from regulation? How long until we mostly cannot afford healthcare for the middle class? Aren't we already somewhat there?
We can always go back to letting insurers deny health care based on “pre-existing conditions.” I’d rather regulators deciding people shouldn’t be priced out of the healthcare market for having asthma or diabetes.
Or go back before the (unfunded) EMTALA bill where uninsured people were told to just die in the hospital parking lot.
Whatever mechanism the government uses to “ensure affordable access” would be a regulation. We’ve seen what fully unregulated healthcare looks like and it’s people dying in the streets.
Agree that it would be a regulation. I'm suggesting that this be the goal of regulation, though. Instead, many regulations seem to be focused on improving quality without regard as to how that affects access.
That is the goal on the Dem side though. Universal healthcare isn’t picky on the how but on the outcome. That was a core theme of the failed “Hillary Care” bill in the 90s.
The Republican EMTALA bill solved access. Every ER is required to treat everyone regardless of their ability to pay. The republicans didn’t fund this particular bit of regulation so the costs flow into the outsized bills hospitals charge.
As you talk about the affordability of healthcare, I assume that you're talking about the US system. Consider this: is US healthcare more or less regulated than that of the rest of the developed world?
A more suitable comparison would be whether the US's (or Germany's) healthcare system is more or less regulated compared to 50 years ago. Now also look at the pricing.
The same Marc Andreesen who complained that there shouldn't be housing built near him because it would lower his property prices?
How can someone who has read Why Nations Fail miss the point? We don't build for the same reasons that we didn't from the year -2000 to the Enlightenment. Because it's now better and easier in so many cases to just rent seek. Why bother constructing housing when you can just have other people's labour increase your land values? Why should I increase the supply of residency spots when constraining that supply increases my salary by $100k? Why bother with bold bets when you have net work effect monopolies? It's not talkers standing in the way of builders, it's leeches.
Pretty much. It’s amazing the author does not realise he is just doing the work for the extractive institutions when he asks for less voices at the table. And that in fact a lot of what passes for regulation is just those same extractive institutions protecting themselves.
Local community input isn't really "more voices". You're only counting one small group of voices, and those voices are mostly used to rent seek. I'd argue that the Japanese system of national streamlined zoning incorporates far more voices than local community input, since it represents the whole country instead of just the neighborhood.
> Former head of the US patent office Charles Duell agreed: “Everything that can be invented has been invented,” he yelled from a hole in the mud in 1899.
Duell did not say that[0,1]; in fact, he said rather the opposite[2]:
"In my opinion, all previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the present century will witness. I almost wish that I might live my life over again to see the wonders which are at the threshold."
The dictatorship of the articulate? So the author is clearly saying, "people" should not be in the room, or if in the room, be unable to speak, or if able to speak, be ignorant of their rights-- unless they support whatever he values. And then where will these people be? In which room? And what ability to speak should they have? And what about their rights should they know?
"In the old days, it was so cheap and easy and quick to steal indigenous lands. But now? What a fuss those guys make!" said the author, in my imagination as I hypothesize about how he thinks.
I guess the most charitable thing I can say is that maybe the author truly believes that once it's too late to stop the destruction of a historical building, or neighborhood, or wetland habitat, people will just shrug and learn to enjoy their new... Amazon distribution center or whatever he is so passionate to build for the world.
Essentially the more people have veto power or require consultation the harder it is to get anything done. The more policies and rules there are (particularly once uncertainty about what the rules are creeps in), the harder it is to build.
If you've worked in a large corporation and a 10 man startup this should be obvious. In the latter you can spin up a new service in a couple of hours. In the former a couple of months is a blistering pace.
I have worked in a large corporation (Apple, but back when it had only 12,000 employees). Yes, it is harder to build when there are more voices. The answer is not to demean or marginalize those voices. The answer is to create relationships so that you build legitimate trust. Then you can proceed with fewer people in the actual room, without abusing the people outside the room.
> In the latter you can spin up a new service in a couple of hours. In the former a couple of months is a blistering pace.
In the latter you can harm society in ways that take a couple of hours to fix. In the former, you can cause harms that take months or years to fix (and, with enough lobbying, you can make taxpayers foot the bill).
>In the former, you can cause harms that take months or years to fix (and, with enough lobbying, you can make taxpayers foot the bill).
I don't think "years" is enough to convey the potential damage unregulated businesses can cause. The time and resources to fix issues can scale well beyond human timescales. This is clearest when environmental damage is involved, whether it be CO2 emissions that will exist for O(100) years in the atmosphere or loss of biodiversity that took O(10,000) years to evolve.
Here are a couple of concrete examples of companies inflicting eternal costs onto society that were covered well in Tom Scott videos:
You're absolutely right. The "move fast and break things" position in society is just not good. It's fine if you're doing rapid prototyping on a product that can be easily discarded cheaply and at low cost to everyone involved. It's another thing entirely to move fast and break things without considering the people who will be affected, and asking what they think about it, especially for things that are not easily or cheaply reverted.
Very true. It's quite shocking how often supposedly 'very smart' folks suddenly stop thinking when considering second order, and higher, consequences. Maybe it's a symptom of some deeper underlying problem, motivated thinking, etc...
It doesn't matter whether or not your new big corp service is in the "takes a couple of hours to fix" category. It will still take months and will be even more unreliable than the startup service.
This is what I consider the modern face of Fascism.
I know you're not supposed to use that word, because it really upsets Fascists.
But really, long passionately argued essays about how democratic governance is stopping us from returning to the good old days and we should let the powerful do whatever they want.
Using dubious emotional arguments like laundromats can't be historic buildings? Calling things dictatorships, run by the articulate? Warning that nations fail if everyone gets a seat at the table?
>This is what I consider the modern face of Fascism
I see the word Fascism thrown around so much these days, I realized I've forgotten the real meaning of the word, so I had to look it up, and it seems that what the author is saying shares no overlap with the true meaning of the word.
I would suggest coining a new term for whatever it is you're trying to describe, rather than attempting to reinvent the definition of an existing term, because not only is it confusing, but it feels like a manipulative use of language.
> [F]ascism is best defined as a revolutionary form of nationalism, one that sets out to be a political, social and ethical revolution, welding the "people" into a dynamic national community under new elites infused with heroic values. The core myth that inspires this project is that only a populist, trans-class movement of purifying, cathartic national rebirth (palingenesis) can stem the tide of decadence. -- Roger Griffin
> Marxists argue that fascism represents the last attempt of a ruling class (specifically, the capitalist bourgeoisie) to preserve its grip on power in the face of an imminent proletarian revolution. Fascist movements are not necessarily created by the ruling class, but they can only gain political power with the help of that class and with funding from big business. Once in power, the fascists serve the interests of their benefactors
> It is usually assumed, for instance, that Fascism is inherently warlike, that it thrives in an atmosphere of war hysteria and can only solve its economic problems by means of war preparation or foreign conquests. But clearly this is not true of, say, Portugal or the various South American dictatorships. Or again, antisemitism is supposed to be one of the distinguishing marks of Fascism; but some Fascist movements are not antisemitic. Learned controversies, reverberating for years on end in American magazines, have not even been able to determine whether or not Fascism is a form of capitalism. But still, when we apply the term ‘Fascism’ to Germany or Japan or Mussolini's Italy, we know broadly what we mean. -- Orwell
> The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power -- FDR
I thought I was clear on the aspects I recognised.
Democratic control over things that affect everyone and benefit everyone is necessary to avoid e.g. free rider problems, pollution.
Democratically restricting other people's rights, to the extent that people are not allowed to e.g. subdivide a house into a duplex, all because it would reduce the voters' property values, is immoral and counter productive.
Certain rights should not be subject to democracy to the same extent as other laws. When a country comes up with a constitution enumerating rights and makes amending those rights very difficult, that's saying that those rights should be (to some extent) removed from democratic control.
But you are absolutely right, when people talk about reducing democratic control, they often secretly mean giving power to technocrats rather than returning power to the people.
The counter to the democratic outcome not being “your personal choice” is to admit defeat, rest up, reflect, and look for better, more popular positions next time. Ie continue engagement in the relevant systems. Attend local council meetings or other hearings - and be polite, respectful and thus some base level respectable. In the US, democratic republic norms are aggregate personal acts and not a state. Like jury duty.
The two most famous Fascist movements in history replaced democratic governments after initially attacking them as failures for decades beforehand and promising to return the nation to greatness and save it from failure.
They did (most of) the famously bad stuff they are remembered for after they took over and abolished the democracy and its institutions, so no one could stop them.
Many of the people they killed would have lived in democracies all their life. And became targeted because they stood in the way of them politically in that democracy.
So I feel a blanket rule of "you can't call anyone a Fascist in a democracy" is not particularly historically insightful or useful, no matter how many countries and/or dictatorships you've visited.
That's not the point of my comment. The point is that today we use those words without any notion of the scale they imply.
So they lost their meaning. To me it's the other side of virtue signaling, easy words to toss around to get an ego trip without having to think too hard about the nuances of the world. And you can only do that precisely because you live in a free society, because the people you are calling fascist will not kill you for doing it. Because you have the education to do so. Because you have the time and energie to do so. Because you are safe with the medium and your audience to do so. And because you don't have a fascist as a leader that is so obviously so dangerous that calling someone fascist on tweeter in comparison would make you feel stupid since it's so obviously dispropostionate.
The point is, the people doing that are immature, unexperienced, and use a word that meant to target the horrors and evil of this world to attack what are merely bad people.
It's not a political statment that they are making. It's a demonstration of how naive, ignorant and arrogant they are.
And it's an insult to people living with actual fascists every day, that one does from the comfort of their sofa where they can get food delivered and watch youtube video.
You can call someone fascist in a democracy, but then they must have in their political program the same thing as Mussolini or Hitler did. The burden is on the person to quote Main Kampf (which I doubt their read) or show similar live actions and show the parallel.
And it cannot be a single thing, it's a collection of ideas and behaviors. A racist or a pro life or somebody going to a book burning is not diserving the title. Because it's only one thing. Everybody is doing ine thing somebody else find terrible.
> World Fascism: a Historical Encyclopedia notes that "Although he was authoritarian and ruled dictatorially, Pinochet's support of neoliberal economic policies and his unwillingness to support national businesses distinguished him from classical fascists.
See, if you sell the nationalized companies to your family, and they profit from selling your countries resources abroad, then you're no true Fascist.
> Mussolini, a leading member of the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano) before World War I, became a fierce antisocialist after the war. After coming to power, he banned all Marxist organizations and replaced their trade unions with government-controlled corporatist unions. Until he instituted a war economy in the mid-1930s, Mussolini allowed industrialists to run their companies with a minimum of government interference. Despite his former anticapitalist rhetoric, he cut taxes on business, permitted cartel growth, decreed wage reduction, and rescinded the eight-hour-workday law. Between 1928 and 1932 real wages in Italy dropped by almost half. Mussolini admitted that the standard of living had fallen but stated that “fortunately the Italian people were not accustomed to eating much and therefore feel the privation less acutely than others.
> In the political discourse of the fascist right, economic problems related to large disparities of wealth between rich and poor were treated as problems of social status and class prejudice. Rather than attacking upper-class wealth, fascists attacked upper-class snobbism.
> Fascist movements criticized parliamentary democracy for allowing the Marxist threat to exist in the first place. According to Hitler, democracy undermined the natural selection of ruling elites and was “nothing other than the systematic cultivation of human failure.” Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, maintained that the people never rule themselves and claimed that every history-making epoch had been created by aristocrats.
That last one could have been inserted into the current article and fitted perfectly.
Why do people have such a false, cartoon-like, impression of what actual historical fascist movements did?
But you're right, it's much more important that he killed people:
> Fascist squads, militias inspired by Mussolini but often created by local leaders, swept through the countryside of the Po Valley and the Puglian plains, rounded up Socialists, burned down union and party offices, and terrorized the local population. Hundreds of radicals were humiliated, beaten, or killed. In late 1920, the Blackshirt squads, often with the direct help of landowners, began to attack local government institutions and prevent left-wing administrations from taking power. Mussolini encouraged the squads—although he soon tried to control them—and organized similar raids in and around Milan. By late 1921, the Fascists controlled large parts of Italy, and the left, in part because of its failures during the postwar years, had all but collapsed. The government, dominated by middle-class Liberals, did little to combat this lawlessness, both through weak political will and a desire to see the mainly working-class left defeated. As the Fascist movement built a broad base of support around the powerful ideas of nationalism and anti-Bolshevism, Mussolini began planning to seize power at the national level.
Letting neighbors veto projects isn't democracy. Democracy is "rule by the public". That means the whole public, not just a small subset of it. Why were the neighbors consulted but not those in other parts of the city, or other parts of the state?
Localism is sham democracy, it's oligarchy wearing an democratic mask.
Furthermore, giving people a seat at the table is not the same as giving them veto power. People should have a right to voice their opinion, not to unilaterally control others.
> Using dubious emotional arguments like laundromats can't be historic buildings?
Ironically, the state preventing people from demolishing irrelevant structures to build housing that will exist entirely on their own private property is actual Fascism. I suspect it's a Fascism you're sympathetic to, but it's much more literally Fascism than the alternative.
> The building’s sardonic “historic laundromat” nickname stems from a 2018 study the city conducted to determine whether the property should be preserved as a historic asset.
> The concern at the time was not that the building itself might have historic value, but that as the building’s onetime offices of certain local activist and nonprofit groups it might be worth preserving.
> This did not turn out to be the case, and the contemptuous shorthand term has stuck with the building ever since.
Fascism is a dead political movement that lived in Europe beginning to mid 20th century. Everything else that came afterwards is something else, different. By using that term you are referring to those dead political parties. Who is a Nazi nowadays? The political party does not exist anymore as far as I know. ie No one is a Nazi today.
You do you, use that word if you want but you are not promoting a healthy conversation if you start labelling people and assuming to know their perspective.
I agree that democratic governance is good. Yet let's be frank, kids have no place at the table. It is the responsibility of their parents to listen to them and promote their needs at the said table. ie at the table everyone should be taken into consideration (whether they are a kid or not) but not everyone should be at the table. (as for who is a kid and who is not, that is another subject)
I believe not everyone deserves to be at the table, the same way not everyone deserves to be part of a board of directors. As for why, I am certain you can figure that out on your own.
I answered you because I was slightly disturbed by your use of the word fascism. I hope you see that we are on the same boat.
___
On an adjacent note, personally, I do not care about nations/organizations. I care about people. Individuals. Does my country care about me? No, a country has no brain, no emotion. The question anthropomorphizes an entity emerging from a group individuals. A group cannot love me but each or any individual of said group can.
The article is arguing that the people the author agrees with should have more authority to do what they want and the people they disagree with should have less. And when those people won't leave then "we need to be okay ruffling some feathers". Sounds pretty fascist aligning to me.
If you can tell me that I cannot do something with my property, and I want the freedom to tell you to take a hike, I don't see how that makes me a fascist.
After playing around with GPT-3 a bit, I've started to suspect a lot of humans are actually very good at manipulating semantic sentences, without necessarily understanding their content.
It would explain why so many "smart" people will often speak long sentences that sound right, but have zero information content in them.
Maybe it's just not that hard to construct grammatically and semantically correct, but zero information gain sentences, paragraphs, speeches (as in, very hard, but much much easier than thinking new novel thoughts).
As a former technical writer for a major health insurance company, I can attest to this. After writing hundreds of massive documents, guides, tutorials, call scripts, policies and the like, I still had only a tenuous understanding of all the complex bullshit I was writing about.
For that specific industry, the convoluted and needlessly complex garbage is absolutely by design, but it’s a similar concept, I think.
Well, Devil's advocate, i think it's good to talk about stuff you don't understand. It's useful to practice declarative knowledge and hedging ignorance, in front of others, that we might tune into the useful level of understanding.
Just to know what words are relevant, what biases are appreciated, what ignorance is allowed.
We might even begin to understand the counterpoint for the OP: it takes time to digest change. Not everyone sees change the same.
Maybe we've had enough radical futurism coming to roost; I think it's weird that dystopian sci-fi now feels normal and I can't watch old movies. Maybe you haven't had enough.. commute to manifest a heretofore only simulated job on Mars in your Tesla Boring Machine.
According to the PIAAC, 54% of Americans are illiterate. That is, they are able to read simple things like menus, but they are not capable of synthesizing new information from multiple texts, or understanding the nuance of an authors argument. If I recall correctly, Americans scored an average of around 275/500, while the best scoring country, Finland, scored an average of 300/500. (This is a statistically significant jump, and causes a huge portion of those in Finland to not be considered illiterate, but they just begs the question of why the literacy cutoff is where it is.)
Functionally illiterate and illiterate are different concepts. If you can read a menu the thing that’s stopping you from reading and understanding a complex text isn’t about letters and sentences; it’s the inability to recurse on abstract thought and build complicated thoughts that depend on a body of knowledge.
Eliding the difference between functional illiteracy and illiteracy confuses unnecessarily.
> If you can read a menu the thing that’s stopping you from reading and understanding a complex text isn’t about letters and sentences; it’s the inability to recurse on abstract thought and build complicated thoughts that depend on a body of knowledge.
I can often do a decent job reading a menu in Chinese. A complex text would take hours per page and be totally opaque in many parts. (And partially opaque in probably the majority of the text.)
I would argue that in fact what's stopping me from reading complex texts is lack of knowledge of the letters, the words, and the correct structure of sentences.
It’s not just easier than constructing novel thoughts - it’s safer, too. You get to leave the impression of being an eloquent, persuasive intellectual without any of the risk that comes with actually expressing something that people might then dislike.
It’s a funny coincidence that the field where we’re seeing the most innovation happens to be the one we regulated least, and that the fields that got worse are the most regulated ones.
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As Marc Andreessen remarks, in every case, the culprit is regulation.
Ho hum. And the 5 year old AEI chart that's been bumping around awhile.
IIRC TVs are so low because they use a trick called 'hedonic averaging' where a 27 inch TV at the same cost of a 19 inch TV actually costs 1/2 as much, since you get twice as many square inches. Even though, you know, you still are only watching 1 TV at a time and looking at 100% of the screen on both. Whatevs.
The funny thing about ridesharing is that the "innovation" is literally just circumventing regulations designed to stop independent depression-era drivers from filling up the roads (e.g. medallion and licensing systems). If those regulations didn't exist, it wouldn't take a massive company to get them changed, and we might have ended up with distributed local markets for drivers rather than a few competing multinationals.
'It’s a funny coincidence that the field where we’re seeing the most innovation happens to be the one we regulated least, and that the fields that got worse are the most regulated ones.'
because the causation is the other way around mostly
Whilst it's true that there are a lot more rules, there are areas that have been largely without them (crypto comes to mind), and outcomes are still often not so good. With as many people as there are on this Earth, packed as densely as they are, there are increasing amounts of commons, and also increasing numbers of tragedies occurring in these myriad commons as well.
I'm not sure getting things done for the sake of it is desirable if it means we have an ocean of copy-pasted apartment buildings like Hong Kong, or unprofitable bullet trains running empty like China, or asbestos products or other things. The notion that we must “move fast and break hearts" on failed ideas is kind of fanciful, because in practice in society we don't often have a clear figure elected to do that; we don't live in a dictatorship where a flick of a finger can end a project after all. Councils and groups of talkers coming together are presumably trying to perform this actual function, and I think we don't necessarily give them credit for that.
Fundamentally, some of that articulate class is trying to preserve some kind of life style that they perceive is rapidly evaporating in the face of cheaply built things built purely for profit.
> we don't live in a dictatorship where a flick of a finger can end a project after all.
Sure we do: they're called planning, zoning, or environmental review boards. And process by which they operate has been engineered to make it increasingly easier to stop projects. In some states like California, any random person (they don't even need to live in the community!) has the power to stop projects for months, if not years, all but guaranteeing either failure or massive budget expenditures.
Your argument is basically a Slippery Slope argument. The flaws in Slippery Slope are well known, but the mentality is so very attractive to the way humans think. See, e.g., Prospect Theory. As a community becomes wealthier, more people have more to lose, and they will predictably become ever more cautious about change--any kind of change, even change that on its face is positive and enriching. In the back of their minds they're thinking, "But what if this, or what if that, later on down the road, causes the loss of what I already have." Everything begins to look like a zero-sum game.
Perhaps the only thing worse than this state of affairs is the complete opposite state of affairs, where most people are desperately poor. They have nothing to lose so they're happy to leap from radical project to radical project chasing a parade of cheap promises made by snake oil men. See, e.g., most any poor country.
Potentially, but I think we have actually slipped down a lot of these slopes at one point or another. These negative possibilities are not just hypotheticals, they are informed by actual failures. I'm not going to argue that there aren't people defending their interests selfishly in such arrangements, - there definitely is, as well. Maybe such councils should be filled with non-affiliated neutral parties that are randomly elected?
"an ocean of copy-pasted apartment buildings like Hong Kong"
That's an incredible way to frame place for people to live. You may find that aesthetically disgusting, that's your right, but I find the legally mandated suburbs of an expensive city to be morally disgusting given the impacts on the environment and poor people.
This isn't a discussion about housing availability. You should make a new submission about that if you want to go into that topic in depth. There are facets to this discussion that your post is glossing over; it's not a binary choice between HK style apartments or suburban sprawl.
>This isn't a discussion about housing availability
Down-talking dense, quickly built housing because you don't like how it looks IS making it about housing availability. Those buildings were built to quickly get people housing in a reliable way. Every month they waited was a worse housing situation.
I don't really accept any discussion of reducing subjective eyesores when it comes to housing. It's always used as a political weapon against housing. Someone's ability to have shelter always beats out the other person's subjective aesthetic tastes that they have no right to impose on anyone.
Hi. Longtime Hong Kong resident here. Public housing and private housing in HK could both be described, in terms of appearance, as copy-pasted. Quality of construction is exceedingly poor (to get the flavor, you could watch this new-build home inspection video from local TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShJtbmkjKG8) and backwards (e.g. single-pane windows are the norm, walls have zero insulation, etc.).
The wait list for public housing is many years long. Depending on whose numbers you believe, between 100k and 200k people are living in subdivided apartments (which, in some cases, translates to a bed inside a literal metal cage -- hence the term "cage apartments"). Private housing costs have gone down very slightly thanks to political developments and purported pandemic control policies, but prices for badly-built, tiny, puzzle-piece-shaped apartments in huge copy-pasted high-rises are eye-wateringly high.
Saying it's copy-pasted is a criticism of the aesthetic, not the build quality. Copy-pasting designs is just economies of scale and should lead to cheaper construction and design costs, all else held equal.
I have no problem with regulations of apartment quality. Those are usually too lax.
This is a point made elsewhere in the thread. We need more good regulations and less bad regulations. More regulations of build quality (e.g noise transmission, double pane windows). Less zoning and aesthetic regulations.
There's technically no reason that copy-pasted skyscraper apartment buildings can't be built to a high standard, quality-wise, and it certainly may yield savings to the entity commissioning the project.
But there's no reason they can't be built to a low standard (and this subthread is about Hong Kong, where that is certainly the case) and there's nothing preventing cheaply-built, shabby, cookie cutter housing from being sold at exorbitant prices (ditto).
Your statement, in taking issue with someone else's completely accurate description of HK buildings as copy-paste jobs, that you "don't really accept any discussion of reducing subjective eyesores when it comes to housing" in tandem with an invocation of "ability to have shelter" signaled a deep lack of understanding about HK's housing situation.
I'm telling you that HKers aren't seeing any of the "ability to have shelter" benefit you seem to be imputing to ugly, identical tower blocks. The wait list for copy-paste public housing is years long and it's a byzantine process to get into an apartment even then. Private copy-paste housing costs an arm and a leg for cubby-hole sized micro-apartments, so much so that 100-200 thousand people at any given moment are living in desperate conditions under spalling concrete, with rats and bedbugs, and shared toilets and "kitchens" that I suspect would give you the dry heaves if you were to take a tour of such places.
Do you think the wait list for public housing would be longer or shorter if the government enforced your esthetic preferences on apartment construction?
Or to say it another way, your posting claims that HK housing is both too expensive and too low quality. If the government solved the low quality problem by banning it, it would probably make the expensive problem worse.
I’m not saying that housing quality should never be regulated. I’m saying that regulation can have side effects policy makers need to consider.
The aesthetics of public housing in HK is not a factor in the pace of public housing construction or the amount of public housing made available. Appearance and supply are completely unrelated. Supply is maintained at an always-woefully-inadequate level and many are allowed to live in squalor.
This, purely by happenstance, ensures a market for new and used low-quality, cramped private dwellings. In turn, everyone's dream is to manage to get a second apartment to lease out and/or emigrate so that they can retire in, for example, Canada, the UK, or the United States on the proceeds of the sale of their small, poorly-built apartment in a copy-paste high-rise.
Coincidentally, in HK, the government owns literally all of the land except for one or two tiny freeholds (e.g. a very old church is one that comes to mind) and derives a great deal of revenue from land sales (selling long-term leases, really, rather than the land) to property developers. The money from land sales is earmarked for infrastructure projects.
To reiterate: the notion that slapping together near-identical residential skyscrapers in HK helps make housing more accessible is incorrect. Appearance and availability are completely uncoupled here.
> Appearance and availability are completely uncoupled here.
Your evidence for this is that prices are extremely high. But you have no evidence that prices wouldn't be even higher if purely aesthetic constraints were imposed on development that had nothing to do with utility or quality.
Moreover, that's not even relevant to the main problem with the focus on aesthetics. You're right I don't know much about the HK situation, but where I'm from, aesthetics is one of the top two excuses that landowners use to lobby the government to block new housing.
What he is saying is, there is no point in turning San Francisco into Hongkong. If you don't find affordable housing in SF, move somewhere else. It's not the only city in the world.
> There's technically no reason that copy-pasted skyscraper apartment buildings can't be built to a high standard.
> But there's no reason they can't be built to a low standard.
That's my point. Apartments being copy-pasted implies nothing about the build quality, so it's therefore a criticism of the aesthetic, which is what I took issue with.
> I'm telling you that HKers aren't seeing any of the "ability to have shelter" benefit you seem to be imputing to ugly, identical tower blocks. The wait list for copy-paste public housing is years long and it's a byzantine process to get into an apartment even then. Private copy-paste housing costs an arm and a leg for cubby-hole sized micro-apartments, so much so that 100-200 thousand people at any given moment are living in desperate conditions under spalling concrete, with rats and bedbugs, and shared toilets and "kitchens" that I suspect would give you the dry heaves if you were to take a tour of such places.
If you want to add more good regulations that enforce build quality, I'll be right there with you. I haven't seen a country or locale where the building code regulations have been good enough.
> being sold at exorbitant prices
> copy-paste housing costs an arm and a leg
Okay, so decommodify land, build more good public housing, and allow more private housing by reducing zoning restrictions. But "ugly" and "cookie cutter" and "identical" should not feature into the criticism.
I would suggest this speaks to the weight of your experiences coloring your view. It doesn't have to be this way, though, yours are just one set of lived experiences, and the systems you live in are not necessarily objectively the best ones.
The issue you're discussing is that aesthetic objections are being used as a hard roadblock to progress. This suggests that aesthetic input needs to be received without them being an opportunity to derail a project if the projects is passing all other measures it has been evaluated on. It could be said that such input should have achievable criteria for success/passability without being significantly at odds with the premise of the exercise.
Anyway, I would encourage you to make a new submission about it as this is a pressing and heated american issue, and it's clear that you feel strongly on the matter.
The only way that community input into aesthetics won't be used against housing is if land is decommoditized. Until then the financial incentives are such that this will be used as a weapon, as we've seen happen repeatedly. The hypothetical universe where aesthetics can be regulated and that government power isn't abused by the landowner lobby doesn't really exist pre-decommodification.
> I would suggest this speaks to the weight of your experiences coloring your view.
> Anyway, I would encourage you to make a new submission about it
This is extremely condescending and unnecessary. There is no reason for the other poster to “create a new submission” for their points.
If you disagree with them that is ok, feel free to respond to the points. If you’re having difficulty responding to their points, don’t respond. However, as far as I can tell their points are on topic for the example you provided and shouldn’t be dismissed in the way you keep trying multiple times.
There's no point going into the weeds in a discussion ten posts deep when we deviate from the broader topic. It discourages community engagement from the discussion we're having and the main thread and derails the thread as people have to scroll past it to see other comments. This is not why people are here, even if we feel passionate about the topic.
> There's no point going into the weeds in a discussion ten posts deep when we deviate from the broader topic.
That is up to the other person and what the downvote button is for.
> It discourages community engagement from the discussion
Then the community can vote via the down button. Meanwhile, you do not need to be condescending or singly try to shepherd a group conversation.
> This is not why people are here, even if we feel passionate about the topic.
I’ve been using HN for 10 years, other than trying to shut down the other commenter, the back and forth and deviation/tangentiality in this thread isn’t different than I normally have seen on HN.
I think we can all agree that we would like less regulation on us when we are trying to do something, but I wonder how much less regulation we would accept on others who are trying to do something we don't like? I don't think many want to live in a world with no regulation, because some idiot would dumping old cars in the river by our house. I don't know if we're over-regulated or that the world has become more complicated. Sunshine rights over buildings is a good example of an issue that didn't exist years ago. You could make the case that we're under-regulated in an area such as crypto finance.
Those regulations can stay. If you ever worked on a complex highly regulated space such as architecture/construction; there are lot of things that get piled up that make no sense whatsoever even diving into the history and context of why it was written.
For example, Oregon's gas pump law (you cannot fill your own gas), I remember diving into the actual law and reasons behind it said something along the lines of "Because it is dangerous to walk outside in rainy weather and fill your own gas". It was a while ago and I can't find the text, but it was something absurd like this, I'll edit the comment with the factual info. Anyhow, legislators write laws to fulfill their campaign promises and they may not be in the interest of the benefit of the society, especially in the long term.
Edit, I found it:
ORS 480.315(4)
The dangers of crime and slick surfaces described in subsection (3) of this section are enhanced because Oregon’s weather is uniquely adverse, causing wet pavement and reduced visibility;
ORS 480.315(15)
Self-service dispensing at retail presents a health hazard and unreasonable discomfort to persons with disabilities, elderly persons, small children and those susceptible to respiratory diseases;
Say what you will about politics in Texas, but one thing they do that seems really right is institutionalized de-institutionalization via the Sunset Advisory Commission [0], whose job it is to periodically review government agencies' efficiency and relevance etc and provide a recommendation as to whether the pre-planned, automatic abolition of each agency should go forward or should be stayed another 12 years.
Caveat that the text of the laws is often disconnected from what they are there for.
For instance I've seen many local laws explained as "preserving local heritage and historic places" when their actual intended effect is to block affordable housing.
I assume you also see specific building rules that increase the building cost for seemingly no reason, when in practice it helps ruling out low income people moving in. That's from the top of my head, but I'd expect most laws going further that "don't kill people" to be at least half motivated by something else that the stated intent.
I lived in Oregon for awhile and it was commonly said that this was a make work program for reformed felons trying to turn their lives around, like a starter job out of prison.
The need for regulation is directly relation to population size, which is ironic because many of those who are in favor of deregulation are also in favor of unlimited "growth". If you are the only person on the planet, you don't need laws and you don't need regulations - they are moot by definition. If there are 10 people on the planet, they could each have a coal burning power plant that is 1% efficient and still have no measurable impact on the environment. The number of people you jam onto the lifeboat is directly proportional to the number of rules and regulations you need to manage the interpersonal relationships, scarcity of resources and the consequences of behavior on the finite environment.
The chart in the article is nice fuel for the little conspiracy theory I've been internalizing for most of my adult life.
Isn't it suspicious, this hard divide between our wants and our needs?
Our wants (optional goods, luxuries) have gotten dramatically cheaper over time, an explosion of choice, high speed of innovation, accessible and affordable to a growing amount of people, etc.
Our needs (housing, healthcare, education, etc) that for most people in this world add up to the vast majority of their expenses, seem to do the exact opposite.
Imagine that your bills would be 10 times lower in the way a TV got 10 times cheaper. There's very little reason as to why this couldn't happen, but it seems zero or even negative progress has been the trend for decades in a row now.
We got toys and apps, but no true socio-economic progress (at least not in the developed world), in fact the opposite. Per household we work more, not less. Economic security is non-existent as you need to compete with the entire world now and every field is constantly disrupted. Achieving and persisting a basic middle class existence is starting to require a super human effort now. A few decades ago, all it required was a pulse.
The vested interest to at least keep things the same has an existential background. It's people latching on to economic survival. So no, they aren't going to "get out of your way" so you can "build".
This is not really the case everywhere. Healthcare and education are not drastically more expensive everywhere in the Western world. In Europe, these things have not increased in price to the same degree as the US and they are definitely more regulated than in the USA.
Housing is probably a special case because it's an investment, and house owners vote and make decisions based on this.
Healthcare is too complex to settle on, because some disruptive variables are at play, like changes in demographics and highly complicated taxation schemes. I'm from Europe (Netherlands) and healthcare costs has risen by double digits for a long time now, whilst service only degrades.
So let's take education. After 30 years of internet, you'd expect it to be practically free by now. Instead it got exponentially more expensive as well as more bureaucratic.
the article is certainly "Articulate", and i'm sure its content and message is agreeable to many in the community (myself included). no doubt that it speaks to the day-to-day chafes of working engineers and other technical folks in a corporate environment.
taking a look at the author's startup[1] is interesting. it seems clear that he's trying to collapse employees' personal slack afforded by remote/async work. that makes sense in terms of boosting butts-in-seats accountability, and i guess by some draconian measure that could translate to "productivity" (read: answering random interruptions to deep work). but i worry that the very dynamic he's espousing would itself kill builder culture. you can't think deeply about a problem when you have people bombarding your attention based on their own whims. from the company's landing page:
> Actually talk with your coworkers. Walk over to your teammate for a quick question. 10x faster than sending a zoom link.
also, i guess this is more aesthetic, but the skeuomorphism is super weird. i would be super suspicious of a work environment that requires this sort of SIMS-like virtual environment. it seems like a half-assed, 2D version of VR workplaces that are crawling their way out of R&D departments at certain advertising companies (looking at you Meta(verse)).
Weird how during the one tiny era in human history where we've had explosive exponential growth in {technological progress,wealth,etc} we destroyed both human cultures and biodiversity on a scale unprecedented except for the rare natural disasters our paleontologists call "mass extinction events", and created like arguably 2-4 looming existential risks to our species we have yet to figure out how to solve. Sometimes a bias for slower, more considered decisions might be... warranted? Just spitballin' here
Moving fast and building whatever you want on a small scale is probably more feasible than it ever has been. You can go get a 3D printer, use super advanced tools you can get relatively cheap on amazon to build physical things, and even write really crazy complex computer programs on consumer-grade machines that are considered "cheap and dinky". If you own some land that's not around a whole bunch of other people, you can probably build all sorts of fun structures and get away with it. Once that stuff starts scaling such that it affects other people, said other people are bound to care about and try to impose limitations on what you can build. That's called civilization, and it's done a lot more to help large-scale stuff get done eventually than it's done to impede it overall
Yes! I propose we start with the aviation industry which is in dire need of innovation. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a new type of airplane with pointy nose or funky looking wings. We need more new stuff and we need it now. We should regulate it less. Or better, let the manufacturers do it themselves. They build the thing and they know better after all. What could possibly go wrong?
This in my opinion was an anti-regulation tirade masked as a call to action to makers. I’ve worked now for a while with physical product development, and had worked before with web development. The main difference is that physical products have an ability to kill/maim/hurt you if not properly designed. I welcome regulations on electrical, mechanical and anything that will hurt you if improperly used. Most websites or consumer software in general won’t hurt you much.
I would appreciate more discussion on the nuances of design and working with limitations; from the brief, from the target, from the regulatory and compliance landscape. The great innovations come in satisfying all those constrains , and end up with a great product at a great price
Running water, and sewer pipes, of course were and are provided by government. So, too, electricity. It’s fun for the author to highlight all the progress of the 1930s.
When you’re a billionaire, every year you can keep government regulators and trustbusters at bay, whether in the 1870s (a lot of historical parallels) or today, the annual returns are material. They at least know their history, and know that sooner or later the jig will be up, but with a bit more time, maybe their names will go along with Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, Frick, Mellon, Huntington, etc. In the meantime, for a few million, you can get the founders of portfolio companies to carry water for you about the importance of keeping regulation away from innovation.
Meanwhile, about that Triangle Shirtwaist factory…
There is a deep irony in writing an over-worded essay that effectively says 'I don't like it when people outside my profession regulate my actions'. Keep It Simple, Stooge.
I definitely think that the wake left by crypto steaming by and then striking multiple successive icebergs demonstrates that regulation is crucial and that unregulated fields with potential profits very quickly become a hell dominated by huge corporations who start to dictate the terms of the field.
True. Almost as if the regulations... Protect? The... Consumers?
No no, its the 'talkers' ruining it for the 'builders', surely. Not like people in a given industry ever want regulations. Please don't look up Louis Rossma-
Some regulations help people, and some regulations hurt people.
Regulations that usually help people:
- anti-dumping and pollution regulations
- regulations that mandate disclosing added sugar on packaging labels
- regulations that protect workers in endogenous bargaining disputes.
Regulations that usually hurt people:
- single-family zoning
- price ceilings
Regulations are just laws that force businesses to behave a certain way. And laws can be good or bad, because lawmakers can be corrupted by money or ideology, or because laws can have unintended consequences. Regulations are not good or bad in the abstract.
The mindset that all current regulations are good is quite toxic, actually, because there are quite a lot of bad regulations that would improve regular people's lives if they were removed or refactored.
Yes everyone is aware that regulations are laws and can be implemented maliciously. We still need regulation despite those shortcomings.
Regulations give people who have a stake in a given resource a seat at the table, even if they're not part of the regulated business' plans. The examples you gave have negative effects, but they also highlight how ill equipped the industries that have them are with dealing with some problems.
The correct response to seeing that some regulations are malicious is to fix the regulations and to address the ways that affected parties were not adequately represented before the regulation was ratified.
The correct response is not to take a philosophical stance against regulation. Taking the philosophical stance conflates a data point with a trend, and also means we get to question the idea of representation at all in a Democratic system (which, if you're against Democratic processes, that's a whole different kettle of fish).
I see that we agree. Like you, I am a proponent of good regulations.
My issue is with extremist views on regulations, which I now see that you don't hold. I rarely see people on the populist left advocating for specific bad regulations to be repealed or even refactored, unless it happens to clash with a hot button social issue they care about such as discrimination. It's the pragmatic center-left neoliberals who are doing that job. The populist left's entire focus is on adding more regulations, and often bad ones such as price ceilings (mixed with some good ones, of course). Don't get me started on the populist right who are only interested in regulating other people's private social choices. The Texas GOP platform is effectively ancap + social conservatism. And I'm not trying to draw a moral equivalence between the populist left and the populist right in the current moment - the populist right is significantly more insane right now.
While its common in the US and similar environments, I think that's not a helpful framing of political interests.
To be explicit, I think pinning things on the left or right gives people a way to characterise a problem which should be inspected analytically.
For example, painting climate change as a 'leftist' cause is not ideal. That's because calling it leftist is common tactic to paint climate scientists as comparable to marginalised groups (who are seen as easier to tease).
The issue here is that it detracts from the practicality of the climate action discussion (what are the bottlenecks for each option, vested interests and what to do, etc) and its in poor taste to the marginalised groups.
So the more stringent the local housing regulators are, the more I should be able to find safe, decent, affordable places to live. Whereas in a place where the average project goes through fewer hearings, where the words "affordability" and "equity" rarely cross planners' lips, the housing should be poor quality, unsafe, way too expensive, only the rich living there. And if I go to a neighborhood that violates every principle of current housing regulation, it should be an unlivable blighted hellscape. Right? How's that consumer protection working out?
You can have good and bad regulations, and too much and too little regulation.
The only really dumb position is that fewer regulations = better always.
For example, there are tons of building codes that keep houses from falling down, and make them livable in many other ways. Those seem good. Others that say that we shouldn't poison the air or water too much. Also good.
So yes, much of the consumer protection is working very well thank you. There are a few places where we went overboard and need to cut back.
For specific instances of corruption relating to construction, this is detailed across a few FriendlyJordies videos but I'm strung for a link right now. Will comment if I find it later.
Yes, Germany and Austria and Singapore and places like that are doing better at this than America.
But you're probably thinking about communist California that passed prop 13 and a bunch of other regulations in the decades before it even became majority Democrat.
This article is an interesting example of the cognitive difficulty of apprehending a complex society.
The bridges perfectly illustrate it. It is not uncommon that renovating a bridge costs more than the initial construction. However, it seems surprising, as the engineering challenges are more difficult to understand, and little additional value is created.
Urban planning complexity increases with a city's maturity. Imagine Paris or Rome. Every building is historical, owned by a combination of individuals and corporations, with water, gas, electricity, wastewater systems span centuries, and an underground with cavities for the subway, ancient mines, and WWII bunkers.
Sure, an app to hail taxis is a nice idea. As the article says, it's not running water, but it is nice. And sure, if committees had discussed it, it would probably never have existed. But a monopoly that takes a 20% cut on precarious workers is not a desirable outcome. So the articulate have stepped in.
Most citizens don't know how to spell CPU. They still have the right to choose their future.
I do have some sympathy with the general idea that we should be able to build a whole lot more than we are. The article takes some odd inspiration though. Marc "build but don't dare build near me" Andreessen. And Uber, which is a bonfire of money and has an infamously wasteful eng culture. Perhaps there's a meta-point being made that this is the best we can show in today's world. I hope not though. Surely there are better examples?
I also like the general idea, but there seems to be a weird underlying motivation. For me Uber is the prime example for bullshit (in the technical sense of the word) innovation. Stuff like Uber should be considered infrastructure so that the profits can go to the drivers. Perhaps the actual reason for lack of 'real' innovation is that it's not what's the most profitable? After all, nobody became a billionaire because the writer's grandma's town/village got running water and a sewage system.
The best example he could come up with in support of his position was Uber? Uber is certainly convenient, but it built its business by moving capital risk to its contractors and by heavily subsidizing fares for years, neither of which is sustainable. And despite that, it has changed very little about the world, other than to devastate taxi companies and further increase traffic in large cities.
Hum. While (or because?) I love the sentiment of "still no running water", too much of available resources has gone and is going into putting existing things in software and a rather small number of classes of products around this. Inevitably, this also means a gradual narrowing of infrastructure, which, again, asks for more of the same solution. Still, we like to refer to this method of evolutionary copying of existing things at ever increasing scale as disruptive. This is also, where the money is. I'm not to the least surprised of the lack of fundamental innovation.
Dogmatic Religious writing like this is always so cringy.
Without regulation, kids would still be working sweatshops instead of learning the necessary skills to become builders.... For example.
The are good regulations and bad regulations. When players are selfish rational and greedy they tend to accumulate power and lobby for bad regulations. It's time to lose that selfish shortemist mentality and gain more freedoms by regulating early and softly to avoid power build up.
We’ve never had so few rights over our own property, and so many over that of others.
I feel this acutely as I have waited years to be allowed to change a leaky roof. It's still not fixed.
I've also been waiting a month for a permit to fix an existing fence. I don't even know why I should need a permit for that at all.
Yet I can show up to a planning meeting and complain that I don't like the applicant's proposed landscaping, causing them three months of delay and the accumulation of huge additional expense.
It's ridiculous. I can hardly stomach doing basic repairs like this. Building something like a brand-new dental office seems unimaginably difficult.
Looking at the graph of price changes, it looks mostly like things that are cheaper come from abroad. Things that got more expensive are strictly domestic / unoffshorable.
I guess this says a few things even before you get to regulation:
- America outsourced a lot of engineering jobs of all sorts, leading to a lower supply of skilled labour at home. The places that received the outsourced jobs got better at it and do it cheaply. Though also, they provided these services at deflated prices, for a human cost, to make this happen. These eye-wateringly expensive projects in the US, how much would they cost if the lowest bidder from Asia was allowed to do it in an open tender?
- As the US got wealthier, people want to be paid better. Where in the past there were plenty of poor people happy to work in childcare for very little money, now there are less, and they need to be paid better.
- I wonder if a lot if things were cheaper because there was more immigrant labour happy to do it cheaply.
I think an interesting comparison is Switzerland, a wealthy country where everything is eye-wateringly expensive, yet also the Swiss can afford it and have more disposable income, even PPP, than peers. Stuff get built, for massive prices, on budget, on schedule, and in good time.
It is both a very well ran country, and with a huge immigrant population. Also pretty bureaucratic still, suggesting this alone is not the root issue in the US.
Yeah, agreed, I meant idiomatic "happy" as in you could find people who would work longer hours in worse conditions for less money.
Childcare must be the best example, it's expensive throughout the developed world and end user cost is mostly wages, I'd imagine. If it is expensive, it means you can't find people who will do childcare more cheaply.
If we want progress, it's important to draw a distinction between the different effects of regulation.
Some regulation enforces the status quo, by helping entrenched interests use their power to crush potential innovators.
Other regulation restricts big players from abusing their dominance, and helps create a level playing field where innovation can succeed on its merits, no matter who's behind it.
It's not helpful to say that what we need is more rules, or less rules. What we need is rules that create a fair playing field.
Exactly what I arrived at, but I use the word better instead of fairer, since a regulation can do net harm without being unfair.
It annoys me when the right just wants to deregulate and the left just wants to regulate. It's ideological possession.
Implement more good regulations. Eliminate the ones that are doing more harm than good by adding too much red tape, or entrenching interests, or having too many unintended consequences.
> Eliminate the ones that are doing more harm than good
Easier said than done. When people have fundamental differences of opinion on what's "good and bad" how can we mutually agree on which "bad" regulations to eliminate? Even worse, we might not even agree on who's doing the regulating.
For example, let's say me and my neighbors dislike Veltian immigrants, and we get our local homeowner's association to set up a restrictive covenant that nobody can sell or rent in the neighborhood to Veltians. Then along comes the government and strikes down our covenants as against the Constitution. To me, the meddlesome State is unjustly trying to regulate our freedom of association. But someone else might see our homeowner's association as acting as a regulatory body and preventing the Veltians from engaging in commerce with local residents.
>It annoys me when the right just wants to deregulate and the left just wants to regulate.
So, while that might be the case when it comes to offshore drilling and gun rights, it's arguably not the case when it comes to abortion and trans rights. It might be more accurate to say that everyone generally wants to minimize regulations that prevent them from achieving their personal, social and political goals. And conversely we want to enact regulations that facilitate our achieving our goals, and that furthermore prevent our ideological opponents from achieving their objectionable goals.
> When people have fundamental differences of opinion on what's "good and bad" how can we mutually agree on which "bad" regulations to eliminate?
Yes, some kind of moral system and political goals are presupposed if we want to start classifying things as good or bad, and not everyone will share these subjective goals. But every political project already has such presuppositions built in, this one being no different.
My point about ideological possession is that the purist "more regulation" and "less regulation" perspectives are logically inconsistent with the other principles that these people profess to hold. So I'm more pointing out the moral incoherence.
> it's arguably not the case when it comes to abortion and trans rights.
So this is interesting. The dichotomy breaks down (or even actually reverses) when it comes to regulation of social issues. But it seems to hold true when it comes to industry regulation, where the only exception to that is when social issues and industry collide. I can't remember a time when a far-left politician has proposed a bad industry regulation to be stripped (unless it clashed with the social sphere, e.g. discriminatory policies). I can't remember a time when a far-right politician has proposed a good industry regulation to be implemented (unless it clashed with the social sphere, e.g. social media). So I do believe there is ideological possession there. Have a read of the Texas GOP platform, it's a mix of anarcho-capitalism (remove all industry regulations and government bodies) and social conservatism.
“Talking” and “doing” are not zero sum: good results generally involve talking about what to do, doing it, talking about how it went and what to change, and trying the new thing in a virtuous iterative cycle.
Regulation is not a scalar: regulation preventing municipal fiber is good for cable companies, bad for municipalities. Regulation mandating bathroom breaks is good for warehouse workers, bad for bond villains, erm, titans of industry. Regulation preventing nuclear power plants is good for fossil fuel companies, bad for carbon emissions (and Ukrainians apparently, somewhat shocking). Regulation preventing new houses is good for the asset class and bad for the working class. “Regulation” is a lot of things, pretty much the only constant is that there will be winners, losers, intended consequences, and unintended consequences like any mechanism design change.
I think the author might be a little skittish about saying what he means: I want the regulatory regime to continue to favor people like me and my role models, in fact I’d like more of that please. Here’s an argument for how that could benefit others enough to get you dear reader, on board with it.
This feels closely related to an observation I made a long time ago.
<<<For the most part different skills are rewarded in different fields, but skill in marketing is practically always rewarded. Therefore, we end up in a world dominated by marketers.>>>
Replace "marketing" with more general arts of persuasion, and you get OP's thesis. Rhetorical skill (which is completely orthogonal to other qualities like honesty or sound judgment) is often the surest route to success, across all fields. It's the "ace in the hole" that beats all other cards. People with the gift of gab usually win the race to get their project approved before others, often contrary to objective merit. They get more promotions, likewise. They gain political power. Our lives are influenced more by persuaders than by makers (and BTW social media only make it worse). I detest this fact, but don't feel I can deny it.
> In approaching this question I had some ideas in mind. I assumed that regulation, bloat and bureaucracy, monopoly power and the Baumol effect would each explain some of what is going on. After looking at this in depth, however, my conclusion is that it’s almost all Baumol effect. That conclusion radically changes one’s evaluation of price increases and decreases over the long run and it changes what, if anything, one might try to do to address such price changes.
That assertion doesn't stand up when relatively simple equivalent things like bridges and bus lanes are built slower and more expensively in certain regions compared to the 1930s, which is a main premise of the article.
This is because the author and many others make the trivial error of not measuring how many people it cost to build those bridges. And when I say cost, I don't mean headcount.
11 people died building the Golden Gate Bridge. Safety does cost more time. But it saves people.
There are many places in europe and asia that build faster, cheaper and safer or just as safe as modern standards today. There is specifically something very wrong with north american infrastructure capabilities.
What the author meant by innovation seems to be limited to world-changing innovation like the telephone or internet. Following that, I’m unsure if world-changing innovation is slowing down primarily because of the talkocracy. The issue is not exactly about innovation slowing down because of X or Y, but as more and more innovations are made, the time needed to get to the next innovation will potentially increase. Each innovation introduces yet another complexity we need to handle, and unless we can keep up with the new complexity on top of the current set of complexities, we’ll just have to contend with the slowness.
It’s possible at some point that the complexity is too big, no amount of talkocracy purge can allow us to replicate the innovation speed of the past.
"It’s a funny coincidence that the field where we’re seeing the most innovation happens to be the one we regulated least, and that the fields that got worse are the most regulated ones."
Man, you almost got it here. Let me rephrase this:
"It’s a funny coincidence that the field where we’re seeing the most innovation happens to be the one with the most immediate ROI, and that the fields that got worse are the ones that are absolutely crucial to society - and therefore heavily regulated - but aren't 1000x unicorns that get their investors on the cover of Fast Company and their CEOs the subject of Hulu docudramas."
> 30 years ago was 1990. What’s happened since then? The Internet and smartphones, mostly.
This is glossing over things that have changed _thanks_ to these new technologies. A lot of things that used to be niches and counter-culture in the 90s (and poised to stay as such) have been accelerated thanks to the radically different way we can communicate.
The way we consume and trust our news, and by consequence the way that we build our world-view and by extension the way we build our tribal bonds and perceive our identities has been profoundly influenced by these two little words, internet and smartphones.
This is why I hate the dichotomy between business and IT, that is so prevalent in the consulting, and my work. I had a neat idea about how to fix some common problems that we had. My smart manager told me: Do it.
But we had to wait for project
portfolio management to put it in, and then it had to be prioritized.
Well, it fell off the plate. At that time, I've already moved on.
Companies want to be innovative, but as the article stresses,
innovations are fragile. Especially if companies want to become
more digital, they have to let go of grand schemes,
employ builders, and give them space to build.
This is what you get when you have "grassroots democracy," when any unemployed busybody can show up at a council meeting and demand a new rule or a new vote.
Fareed Zakaria has commented on this problem extensively.
I wonder who Andreessen thinks is responsible for all the ridiculous zoning laws… wonder what sort of means he may consider if his letter asking not to build near him isn’t successful…
For those out of the loop like I was:
> I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton … Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.
>
Subject line: IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development!
I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton … Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.
So what would be running water? What's the next leap forward in terms of basic human needs? I can think of a few possibilities:
- Cheap housing
- Cheap medical care
- Dramatic reduction of
modern diseases like obesity & heart disease
- Less social isolation
- Dramatically reduced working hours
- Dramatic increases in happiness/life satisfaction/optimism
- Reversal of climate change/resilience to environmental disasters
- Dramatically improved stewardship of the environment (part of resiliency)
But I'm not sure there's any product that can be developed by a corporation to bring about these changes. I think we have the physical abilities/technology to accomplish these, but we're lacking the social/psychological/political ability. Much of the population could indeed lower their working hours if they weren't so busy paying for large houses, stuff to fill them up, cars, etc. And replacing those things with skills (cooking, repair) and physical activity (walking, biking) again could reduce housing costs, health care costs, and obesity/cardiovascular disease while hugely reducing our environmental impact. Cutting out TV/digital addictions, playing sports instead, and going car-free/walkable/bikable could give us more socialization, satisfaction, and health. Have we as a society bargained with the devil, forgoing these advances for ever-increasing consumption, productivity, and the hedonic treadmill?
(I've been reading Early Retirement Extreme and thinking about what to do with my life.)
"let builders build" and bemoaning regulations while celebrating Uber seems absurd when you remember how Uber's self driving car program ended and how their finances look.
I think most that could have been said on this topic has been covered by the other comments. I’ll share an anecdote however on how ‘just build’ without impedance can lead to societal tech debt:
I live down the street from an underutilized former industrial complex. For over a decade now, the owners have planned a rehab to demolish old buildings and construct brand new shiny biotech offices (note: I live in a biotech hub, land is very expensive).
so why has it taken so long? Sure there’s your usual culprits like zoning review and environmental negotiations to cut down mature trees, but the real reason is debt from the 1920s. In the authors vaunted era of building, in the 1920s and 30s, the industrial complex built asbestos products. Now there are fine asbestos fibers in the soil across the entire complex, and demolition/construction will obviously disturb them from where they are currently at rest. This is an actual health hazard to the entire community and the workers, not just mere red tape.
It’s easy to forget because factories have largely moved out of the country, but regulations exist to protect our soil, our water, our air, and our health. We don’t need to create future superfund sites to satisfy our desire to move fast and build things.
> It’s a funny coincidence that the field where we’re seeing the most innovation happens to be the one we regulated least, and that the fields that got worse are the most regulated ones.
type of pithy observation that sound reasonable (even smart) until you think about it for two seconds, or do even a modicum of historical research on. the graph supplied is so misleading I can’t read further. I hope the author manes to make some good points tho.
The other day, embarking exhaustedly from a nine-hour transatlantic flight, I said to my wife: "They really need to hurry up and invent teleportation - what's taking them so long?". She replied tiredly: "I hope they won't. Once we have a way to get to work instantly, I'll have to work even longer hours"...
I feel this sort of fatalism is rather pervasive. I'm a huge fan of 1950s technology ads, showing housewifes kicking back with a cocktail inside the airconditioned glass bubble on top of their lawnmower. But this promise of technology to improve your quality of life and to let machines do your work while you relax has largely been replaced by a promise to let you do more work, consume more content and improve your overall efficiency.
There's a weird conflict here. We can empirically prove that life has gotten meaningfully better on a large number of metrics (the Steven Pinker message) - but our perceived reality has been heading downhill for decades, and there is a pervasive sense that every additional technology accelerates this process.
> Everywhere I look, I see the rise of talkocracy — others have called it the dictatorship of the articulate. Talkers standing in the way of builders; offering we ponder, analyze, investigate, research, dissect, agonize endlessly over plans before we lay a single brick.
Ok, so how do technologically-minded folks learn to talk better than anyone else, to hack that system and make it work again? Is there a system for it?
The author is calling for deregulation just to build more wealth extraction machines for the already-wealthy.
In re: the first part about building, check out the history of the Embarcadero freeway, the one that isn't there anymore. There are good reasons why things have slowed down, why we consider longer and deeper before we build.
In re: "Too many seats at the table" you'll notice that it's the other fellow's seat that the author wants to take away, not their own. "There is always a loser to any change" indeed. That's why we want multi-stakeholder decision making: to make global optimizations.
People don't hate Uber because they made it easier for [some] people to get around. People hate Uber because they destroyed traffic etiquette and because they rip off their employees to enrich their investors: https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-the...
I'm really suspicious of the arguments that compare the cost to build the Golden Gate bridge in 1930s vs costs of building similar structure today. I mean, the GG was cheap to build because, back in the day, construction was done by people living in squalor (certainly by today's standards) and done in insaney dangerous working conditions. Do we really long for these days?
This is because Articulate people relay concepts in a simple way.
Even if its something that is well known by almost everyone... the person who can say it the simplest will almost all the time assist in amplifying the loudest.
It's the same as having a really simple UI for your software. It's "articulate" and so simple to use, and so a joy to the users. Especially, if its complex underneath.
right, it's the fault of regulators that every major industry has come do be dominated by a small handful of conglomerates that survive by mimicking each other and consuming every smaller challenger that might one day, through the power of innovation, grow and compete with the existing monoliths.
oh wait, that's the opposite of regulation that caused that. my bad.
People talk about regulation as though it's a single thing. There's a difference between ensuring that food doesn't contain melamine and dictating the precise temperature that a steak must be cooked to. We need terminology capable of capturing the difference between common sense regulation versus hyper-regulation.
I find this sort of article both oversimplifying and overcomplicating why innovation stopped.
Talking about big abstract things sometimes clarifies things, but often leads to situations without a clear path forward.
How do we simplify regulation and reduce the influence of short-term corporate thinking for instance?
I stupidly thought this was going to be an article about how it's much more likely that schmoozer types are able to fund their projects, leaving others in the dust, but instead it mostly just rails against regulation.
At the time, my stance on the Marc Andreessen article was "because we have systematically defunded basic scientific research since the early 2000's", and I stand by that. To me, government funding of research is the only current mechanism by which non-schmoozers are able to get their projects funded (though admittedly, it's super flawed and also involves a bit of political positioning/having the right partnerships/etc).
> History shows that such progress is unnatural, and typically dies quickly.
I once was reading a piece of fiction where, at some time in the future, progress had stopped entirely and was regressing, even if there hadn't been any big conflagration and it was due entirely to a change in culture. One of the reviewers of the piece of fiction said that "such a thing is impossible, people always push for progress". I'm not sure even of that, that people always push for progress, but I know for a fact that progress requires lots of coordinated work and social support, and is all too easy to stop. If you have any doubts, look at most nations on Earth; look at Cuba for example.
Okay, but do we need Golden Gate bridges, and do I need the next running water? I don't look at the world and think "you know what? We're missing technological solutions". I think I am basically ideologically opposed to the writer of this blog post. A lot of people just have this explicit ideology of "all we need to do is improve technology" but I do not find it convincing.
I would rather look at why we think we need continuous growth. What is wrong with a world where we make what we need, own it ourselves, and live on that?
Unlike Buffet, I am not convinced that continuous growth is desirable.
The article argues that building stuff it's complicated because some people want to ponder and analyze too much, hindering innovation and depriving people of good things.
I think you could very well take the opposite position: builders have inflicted plenty of bad on humanity - greenhouse gasses, lead in fuels, deforestation, and so on. Why shouldn't we infer that we need more pondering, analyzing, regulation, to save humanity from the next builder-created plague?
I do not subscribe either of these position, but I think the article does nothing to sway me towards the first.
The world is complex now, it was simple back then, let me explain. I was thinking the other day, in 1950, you could drop a kid randomly anywhere on the map (say the U.S. but not necessarily), he would easily find its way: to the farm, to the factory, to the military or to the church. Everything would be ok for the 1950 kid youd drop anywhere. He would be fine and happy. Drop a kid nowdays and youd be dropping a body, virtually. Very little chance the kid would end up ok, employed nor happy. It's certainly exagerated but you get the idea.
> Everything would be ok for the 1950 kid youd drop anywhere. He would be fine and happy.
Sure. It was a happy and golden time for everyone.
So, one of the amazing things about the modern world is that actual information is at everyone's fingertips, which I find is better than anecdotal conjecture. A quick google away, I can find this document: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1380550/pdf/amj...
From this we can learn that since 1950 the mortality rate among 5-14 year olds has declined at an average rate of 2% per year, largely due to reductions in accident rates (particularly motor vehicle accidents) and deaths due to disease. Of any group of random kids of that age in the US, in 1950 pretty much twice as many of them would be dead by 14 than in the present day. If they were black and male, in 1950 their mortality rate from 5-14 was one in a thousand. That it's only half that today is... still pretty shocking.
And that's just the changing rate for kids encountering the worst possible outcome, during their childhood. What other outcomes have changed? Well, drop a boy randomly in the US in 1950, and from 1964 onwards there's about a 10% chance he gets drafted and sent to Vietnam. Or we could look at the other end of the outcome scale: If your hypothetical kid was a 5 year old girl dropped in 1950 America, she'd have very different opportunities compared to a modern child - she'd be 24 before the first women were admitted to Princeton or Yale, for example. If your 1950 experiment dropped a gay kid into America, well... if they're lucky, they're in Illinois where homosexuality becomes legal in 1962. If they're in Texas, they have to wait until 2003.
About a third of kids in 1950 lived in poverty in the US. That improved a lot over the 60s and 70s. Nowadays it's... around a fifth. Still shocking, but again, your odds look better today than 70 years ago.
And let's not get into the ethical issues of your 'drop a random kid somewhere in the US' plan where that might result in dropping a black child in Mississippi before the Civil Rights act of 1964, where they would grow up under Jim Crow. This kid would spend 4 years in segregated schooling before Brown v Board (and probably years after that waiting for desegregation to actually happen), and our hypothetical 1950 5 year old would turn 18 two years before the Voting Rights act.
Youre twisting my point. Im not saying society was better then. Im saying it was simpler in its structure and certainly more predictive for a given person. Maybe a little bit happier on average even but if we disagree on that no need to break bad about it I can be easily convinced of the contrary.
Don’t mean to twist your point; I’m just putting some statistical information out there that I think suggests a more hopeful picture than your assertion that a random kid in 1950 had pretty good odds of a positive outcome compared to a modern kid having ‘very little’ chance of being happy.
I don’t think it is fair to gloss over the large number of people who were children in the 1950s for whom their chances of happiness were limited from the start, and to hold out some hope that maybe actually on the population level the odds for kids today are slightly better.
your assertion that a random kid in 1950 had pretty good odds of a positive outcome compared to a modern kid having ‘very little’ chance of being happy.
Didnt say a random kid. I said a kid randomly air dropped with no resource nor parenting. I didnt say what kid. I actually dont think he'd end up easily okay today, I could be wrong. Anyway my point was more about illustrating the complexity of society today compared to before, its not about sheer accuracy.
Wow. So let’s unpack that a little more shall we? A kid with no parenting in the 1950s? Maybe they’d find their way into the care of the Catholic Church, where approximately 1 in 10 of the priests were abusers. Or perhaps to a residential school like the ones Canada where 1900 kids wound up in unmarked graves.
Can you please be more specific about what ‘complexity’ in the modern world you feel would contribute to it being so much harder for a kid to survive?
I am not sure where you got the idea that I was saying a Muslim wouldn’t have agency. I am only saying that if a Muslim was dropped in the middle of the country in the 1950s, they would likely encounter difficulties that a white man wouldnt, and that assuming you could just go anywhere in the 1950s and be easily successful is not equally true for everyone.
It took many years to understand this idea persists in our culture:
"God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God. " (1 Corinthians 2:2-5)
Some people might call "talkocracy" simply communication skills, and some of us here (possibly evident by this comment) don't have them. As we go more WFH, comms skills are going to get more and more important, so if we're going to have to suck it up about anything, it's probably improving our ability to sell a hard-to-grasp explanation, or, dare I say.... "vision".
> While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make
the design perfect, we’ve already gone through five rounds of testing.
By the time our rivals are ready to begin development, we are on
version No. 10. It gets back to planning versus acting. We act from
day one; others plan how to plan—for months.
In practice, the case of builders get spaghetti that no one wants to work with later.
The article is mainly about regulations. I understand the OP's sentiment. However, the tobacco industry, the sugar industry, the opioid industry, the oil and gas industry etc have made me very sceptical of private corporations. Governments cannot and should not give a free hand to private companies. Regulation has to be there.
> "30 years ago was 1990. What’s happened since then? The Internet and smartphones, mostly."
GPS devices, eBook readers, smart assistants and displays, streaming media boxes, DVDs and MP3s, a million medications and therapies, electric cars, pod coffee makers, advanced video game consoles, VR... That's just off the top of my head.
> There is always a loser to any change — even when it’s an otherwise overwhelming net positive.
What an insidious argument. It makes the "loser" sounds like someone randomly selected by bad luck, but we all know that when there is lack of regulation, especially in these cases (construction, industry, etc.), who gets the short end of the stick.
We're on that stage of the flat circle again, where people think "survival of the fittest" is the best way to live, that older americans are meaningless and who cares if COVID killed them, etc.
We all know what happened last time these ideologies reared their ugly heads.
It really is a great phrase. I think there's some truth to it. As someone who can be very articulate at times, the influence it lends me isn't always commensurate with my actual skill in that area. Put another way; I've found if you use enough big words and say enough clever things, people will treat you as if you're smart even on unrelated matters.
More broadly there is a thread to pull there about the overwhelming power of narratives- in all forms, words, pictures, sounds- in human- only human- affairs.
Power in every other species on the planet is measured in physical and sometimes mental/tactical capabilities. Only in humans are stories dominant. Of course there is violence in the human world, but the most boldly violent devote the most care to their narratives.
Framing that state of affairs as dictatorship is a brilliant and ironic insight.
I went into the piece expecting more. Instead I got blather about bureaucracy.
I’m constantly impressed by how much people nod when I spout some nonsense. It’s dangerous, especially if you’re prone to believe every praise you receive.
I was similarly disappointed. The phrase "dictatorship of the articulate" brings to mind a passage from "Dawn of Everything", by the recently deceased David Graeber. It's a thick, meandering book, with a lot of hits and misses, but it's still an engaging read.
An excerpt from Chapter 10, subtitled "IN WHICH WE LAY OUT A THEORY CONCERNING THE THREE ELEMENTARY FORMS OF DOMINATION, AND BEGIN TO EXPLORE ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR HUMAN HISTORY":
"""
So does that mean property, like political power, ultimately derives (as Chairman Mao so delicately put it) ‘from the barrel of a gun’ – or, at best, from the ability to command the loyalties of those trained to use them?
No. Or not exactly.
To illustrate why not, and continue our thought experiment, let’s take a different sort of property. Consider a diamond necklace. If Kim Kardashian walks down the street in Paris wearing a diamond necklace worth millions of dollars, she is not only showing off her wealth, she is also flaunting her power over violence, since everyone assumes she would not be able to do so without the existence, visible or not, of an armed personal security detail, trained to deal with potential thieves. Property rights of all sorts are ultimately backed up by what legal theorists like von Ihering euphemistically called ‘force’. But let us imagine, for a moment, what would happen if everyone on earth were suddenly to become physically invulnerable. Say they all drank a potion which made it impossible for anyone to harm anyone else. Could Kim Kardashian still maintain exclusive rights over her jewellery?
Well, perhaps not if she showed it off too regularly, since someone would presumably snatch it; but she certainly could if she normally kept it hidden in a safe, the combination of which she alone knew and only revealed to trusted audiences at events which were not announced in advance. So there is a second way of ensuring that one has access to rights others do not have: the control of information. Only Kim and her closest confidants know where the diamonds are normally kept, or when she is likely to appear wearing them. This obviously applies to all forms of property that are ultimately backed up by the ‘threat of force’ – landed property, wares in stores, and so forth. If humans were incapable of hurting each other, no one would be able to declare something absolutely sacred to themselves or to defend it against ‘all the world’. They could only exclude those who agreed to be excluded.
Still, let us take the experiment a step further and imagine everyone on earth drank another potion which rendered them all incapable of keeping a secret, but still unable to harm one another physically as well. Access to information, as well as force, has now been equalized. Can Kim still keep her diamonds? Possibly. But only if she manages to convince absolutely everyone that, being Kim Kardashian, she is such a unique and extraordinary human being that she actually deserves to have things no one else can.
We would like to suggest that these three principles – call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma – are also the three possible bases of social power. The threat of violence tends to be the most dependable, which is why it has become the basis for uniform systems of law everywhere; charisma tends to be the most ephemeral. Usually, all three coexist to some degree. Even in societies where interpersonal violence is rare, one may well find hierarchies based on knowledge. It doesn’t even particularly matter what that knowledge is about: maybe some sort of technical know-how (say, of smelting copper, or using herbal medicines); or maybe something we consider total mumbo jumbo (the names of the twenty-seven hells and thirty-nine heavens, and what creatures one would be likely to meet if one travelled there).
"""
we're still doing this in 2022? How much of this warmed-over libetrarian claptrap do we still need to sit through? Things are bad because the got dang gubbermint won't let me dump industrial waste into the river! We're failing to innovate because I can't work my employees to death! These dang snowflakes are killing America!
Can you provide evidence for that assertion? My read is dictatorships are famous for only letting a small number of people talk and frequently those people are in a risky situation when the dictator changes their mind.
Searched for the word "union". Not there. If the regulations are half of the problem, unions are the other half. Can’t talk about one and not the other.
> This problem of “too many seats at the table” is pervasive: you actually have to ask for your competitors’ permissions before you can open anything, from a hospital to an ice cream shop. We’ve never had so few rights over our own property, and so many over that of others.
This rang particularly true for me. A long time ago I had gotten into trading as a hobby. I took it seriously, and made some money. However, due to regulatory controls I was kneecapped. Unless I was willing to trade with $25,000 and willing to maintain that balance (PDT requires >= $25,000) I couldn't just have my fun. The kneecapping came in the form of not being able to get out of trades. Not being able to stack into trades because despite liquidity and signing agreements to pay back margin I was still being held back by regulation. So maybe I collect capital and start a hedge fund? Also regulated. Capital requirements are even higher and taxes, fees, etc are insane. Sure, I could trade futures without PDT but there's fewer opportunities because there are fewer markets.
Ostensibly the regulation in the markets was "to protect people" but in fact it simply hurts the majority of people who are responsible and willing to take risk. The only people protected by these regulations are the big banks, trading desks, and hedge funds who by executive fiat trade only amongst themselves. The rules for day trading are simple. You have to sign paperwork to say you're experienced enough to trade options. This should be enough.
I mention this example because it's not unique to trading. Regulation has a purpose. If there's something that is dangerous, and also you can reasonably expect a person of reasonable intelligence to not understand the risk, then it makes sense. Regulations on the car industry make sense. Medical regulations make sense, etc. Last mile regulations? Makes no sense. Regulations for laying your own copper? Make no sense.
But there are so many rules to everything these days. It gets harder to start up anything because there are so, so many hoops to jump through. Capital requirements, paperwork, licenses, etc. All for mundane things. Want to build a fence for yourself? Great. Want to build one for a few friends? Pray the government doesn't find out.
When you read the stories of these millionaires and billionaires, professional traders, construction company owners, etc the majority of them got their start when regulations were low. It allows you to experiment and the vast majority of people don't set out to intentionally damage society. The trade off is risk to the population. Again, if the thing is dangerous and hard to understand regulation makes sense. But we are far too "protected" (deliberate scare quotes) by the government. It makes it impossible for the small guy to start anything truly revolutionary. Regulation is a fantastic scam for insurers and big business in a vast majority of otherwise mundane and borderline trivial industries.
I would challenge a small team of people to try to build a powerful engine without fighting regulators. I imagine we will very soon hit a period where everything is regulated and controlled by vast cabals of business with significant regulatory capture. We've enabled this, and we already do. Most people would be shocked at how many congress critters are on FAANG payroll. How many are on ISP payrolls, etc.
The actual TL;DR of the article is that the author wants to increase the political power of the elites while decreasing the power of the other classes.
Mentioning Uber as the greatest invention of the last 30 years tells us all we need to know.
An ultra-libertarian rant. Let's let the rich and powerful do whatever the fuck they want and to hell with any direct or indirect damage to ordinary people. Not what we need.
> It’s a funny coincidence that the field where we’re seeing the most innovation happens to be the one we regulated least, and that the fields that got worse are the most regulated ones.
Well. This is insinuating that more regulation reduced innovation. But it's confusing correlation with causation. The things that are the most regulated are also the ones with failure is more costly. So maybe _that_ is the reason why innovation is worse there.
That argument may work with something like medical care, but housing and college tuition don't fall into that category as cleanly.
With medicine, the cost of failure is everything up to and including death.
With housing, the "cost of failure" is not having a house. Similarly for college, the cost of failure is not graduating college. Neither of these are good outcomes, obviously, but the solution to not having a house isn't to regulated away the possibility of building more houses.
Firstly, the cost of not having a house for a prolonged period in the north half of the US is death (in the winter). Secondly, there are a lot of other really bad failure cases. For example, houses burning down, poisoning people (via lead, asbestos or others), destroyed in earthquakes, etc. A lot of these can have immediate and severe negative costs for both the people living in them and for society as a whole.
While I was hyperbolic in diminishing the cost of not having a home, my point of regulating any new housing to the point it costs more to build than can ever be made back is a direct cause to the fact many areas no longer have sufficient housing for residents and the housing that does exist costing more than it's worth.
The author of this delightfully titled but almost content-free piece seems not to consider Chesterton's Fence at all: before you criticize let alone dismantle regulation, you should be able to demonstrate a sound understanding of why it came to exist in the first place. For bonus points, a rigorous explanation of why the reasoning no longer applies in the current time period is helpful. TFA provided neither.