I have a heuristic. A 'code smell' for social science articles, which is something like, is all of Western society explained by happenings in the USA?
Caveats: there's nothing wrong with writing an American article about America. And it's not to deny the many incredible achievements of the USA. The 'smell' occurs when you read (in other articles) that inflation was invented by the Fed, or that public schooling was invented for American social cohesion. That such and such US president caused a global long-term phenomenon.
This article is a bit like that. Nothing wrong with focusing on what the USA should be doing, but neglects that the same powerful economic forces operate in all kinds of places - it's hard for Australia to build, for Germany to build, for Turkey to build, for Japan to build. The author perhaps starts from the view that none of those can build great things in the first place and only the USA could be any different. And here are some nineteenth-century Tocqueville quotes to prove it. But it risks going down blind alleys.
How was the industrial revolution built in Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester? How was the Sydney Opera House built? The trans-Siberian railway? The Suez Canal? How was post-war Japan reconstructed? How were the expeditions of the Spanish and Dutch empires put together? The answers might be related to the author's ponderings about the nineteenth-century American spirit, but it's not a perfect correlation.
Building stuff is straightforward where there's not much stuff already - because it's wilderness, or everything has been bombed, or it's something new like the Internet. And stuff can be built where there's hardly any government, and also when the government has huge powers. Building is hardest and costliest when population density is high, when 'land' (or equivalent resource) is in small parcels, and property rights are strong - but those are exactly the conditions that lots of people love to live in.
If societies can figure out how to build new infrastructure in cities, they can also figure out how to build super-projects. Both of those are hard problems. I agree with the article author that it requires co-operation, self-organisation, recognition of common interests and allocation of a decisive authority. But there's no answer yet to the problem of the legitimacy of that authority in places where there are many competing and dissenting interests.
You make a good point -- if you're in a place without basic infrastructure, the government and the people really want that new infrastructure and few will try to stop you. Everyone benefits from the new drastic efficiency improvements. But if all the basic infrastructure needs are met, do you really want someone building a noisy interstate near you?
My theory: in a growing economy, the easiest way to make money is to build something new (e.g. in a city with tons of new real estate being built). In a developed economy, though, there's more incentive for rent-seeking behavior (e.g., there's not a ton of capacity for new development and it's easier to stop your competitor).
Finally, labor is just cheaper in developing economies.
The cost difference per km of rail comparing Tokyo or Berlin to NYC is insane. It’s literally an order of magnitude difference in some cases. And this issue arises in many parts of our society. IT modernization projects in the federal government cost boatloads of money, yet never seem to make any real headway. Even in the private sector, real value adding things like transitioning to electronic medical records never really took until insurance companies and the government started forcing it. And once they did the focus on their design was entirely around billing and coding and not really improving the physician’s workflow or enhancing care.
So while the point may be true everywhere, I think there really is a baked in tendency to veto and strike down proposals for change in the US that doesn’t seem to get quite so rampant in other places.
I don't if this is relevant but at least one of these things is not like the others. In Tokyo rail is privately owned. There are 10+ train companies in Tokyo alone and many more all over. Osaka/Kyoto probably have a similar number.
They get to own the land the trains are on and the stations so many stations become shopping centers run by the train company. Some stores they run, For example Tokyu Trains runs Tokyu groceries, Tokyu department stores. The famous 109 buildings in Shibuya are called 109 because 10 can be pronounced "tou" and 9 can be "kyu". The famous Tobu department store in Ikebukuro with 64 restaurants is run by the Tobu train company. A lot of stations have an "Atre" shopping center above them. Those are Japan Rail owned. Etc...
Some stores they rent out. Many of the new 20-30 story buildings and the new 50 story building above Shibuya station is owned by Tokyu.
That may or may not make it cheaper to build but it gives them more money to support trains and there are also arguably incentives to make your lines the most attractive so people will want to live on that line and patronize your line and all your stores and businesses.
I don't know where it will end but it's a long way from the no self interested incentive to do a good job publicly run trains. Of course many publicly run trains do great as well. I'd be curious to know if there are other incentives that help. For example Singapore trains seem have a shopping center over many stations. Maybe the government runs that and can use the rent to help balance the train books. No idea.
To the meta-point made by the OP... We are now sitting on 200 years of social "science" failure to gain an understanding of this stuff. Theories fall in and out of favour, but they never seem to be affected by reality very much either way.
I think science, as an approach, just isn't a useful way of getting an understanding of why US rail construction costs are so outrageous. It isn't that kind of question. Aspiring to an abstract philosophical or scientific Theory of Government Procurement doesn't take you anywhere useful.
>Theories fall in and out of favour, but they never seem to be affected by reality very much either way.
It's the opposite. Theories happen, but reality isn't affected by them in any way. Part of the reason is because there is no longer a pipeline for public intellectuals or academics to be in any sort of advisory position in government. Those roles are all taken up by career bureaucrats, industry-linked experts from the private sector, or well-connected political flunkies now.
The trouble with that is that while these people are usually established with PhDs or whatever in the relevant field, they're usually a decade or more out of practicing in that field by the time people reach the level in their careers where they can end up on a Presidential committee. So they end up with ideas and preconceptions about their own field that are frozen in amber from a long time ago.
What's more, they've spent the time since assimilating the values of other people who are even older than them. So all their practice and discipline involves explaining theory that is a decade out of date to get buy in from someone whose understanding of the theory is 2 decades out of date.
Theories have enormous effect on reality. Coase Theorem^ dictated how radio spectrum was managed in the US, with disastrous results. Monetarism dictates most decisions made by central banks. Unionisation and later union-busting were very closely tied to social science theories. "Romer theory" had profound influence on world bank and UN policies.
Reality impacting theory though...
Keynesianism remained totally intact when 1980s stagflation disproved it. Monetarism is taught as-is despite the last 10 years of macroeconomic reality. Marxist theories of ancient history and the origins of high civilisation are virtually indisputed despite the discovery of gobleki tepeh, for an example outside of economics.
In the 30s, almost all economists predicted a much reduced workweek. Keynes, the most famous, predicted a 15 hour workweek by the 1970s. Most economists agreed: marxists, liberals, keynsians, corporatists....
The prediction was based on some fundamental theories in economics, combined with GDP & productivity assumptions. The assumptions were right. The theories have not changed. The way economists explain the result is by tweaking theory in a non fundamental way. They mostly argue that people (surprisingly) prefered working 40 hrs, earning more and spending more... The in-theory implication is that people place nearly no value on "leisure."
No need to rethink theories just because they predict falsities. No problem if the updated parameter values imply a reality that is obviously false.
^Technically, a bastardised form of the theory that reverses the authors' intended conclusions.
> Theories have enormous effect on reality. Coase Theorem^ dictated how radio spectrum was managed in the US, with disastrous results. Monetarism dictates most decisions made by central banks. Unionisation and later union-busting were very closely tied to social science theories. "Romer theory" had profound influence on world bank and UN policies.
All of these rose to prominence in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, which is my point. Our institutions are stuck there and haven't been able to break out of them even though most of the theory has refined or invalidated many of these claims based on the empirical evidence and natural experiments we now have.
The most recent one you cited, the Endogenous Growth theory, is actually the one that has been most open to adaptation and criticism. And this is largely because the organizations to whom it is most germane--like the World Bank and the IMF--are largely staffed by economists and social scientists rather than the career bureaucrats and political/industry flacks that the rest of the government is. But even then, it has lots of trouble being reflected in US government policy (agencies like State/USAID) because of that same issue I mentioned.
> No need to rethink theories just because they predict falsities. No problem if the updated parameter values imply a reality that is obviously false.
I don't know where you're getting this from. Basically every 101 level Econ textbook mentions this exact thing and how it led to having to seriously reconsider how much agency workers have in actually deciding their labor/leisure mix. Behavioral and Welfare Economists are particularly interested in this question.
Maybe I'm just old, but my 101 econ texbooks made no mention of behavioral economics and very little of welfare economics. Those were in the wishy washy electives bucket.
I'd actually like to try this experiment, irl. My guess is that the majority of micro teachers today would deal with "What was Keynes' mistake" in the "tweak and defend" way. At most traditional economics schools, LSE or whatnot, I'd put money on it.
Look... I think what you're describing is an effect, not a cause. Social science theories, when faithfully implemented, have had some terrible results.
Formal, orthodox economics still holds a lot of power in the most formal bureaucracies like the IMF, central banks, UN agencies, etc. They like legible, citable orthodoxy. They like to have a beyond reproach "scientific basis" or expert consensus for policies.
There's a noteworthy principle-agent-ish aspect to this. Social science strongholds tend to exist outside of both market and electoral discipline. A municipality or HR department isn't, so social science doesn't thrive there.
All this is a matter of degrees though. Social sciences still do have influence, certainly at the national-political level.
Slight tangent: I'm not actually very familiar with Romer, beyond the basics. Was Endogenous Growth Theory the basis for higher education subsidies, or is that a different flavour of human capital theory?
Behavioral Econ is where all the energy is right now. Advances in computing, data collection, and statistical methods have enabled levels of quantitative analysis around natural experiments that nobody thought possible even a few years ago.
>Social science theories, when faithfully implemented, have had some terrible results.
I think the challenge is that there isn't such a thing as "faithfully" implementing a social science theory. There is too much unaccounted for to just blindly apply. What you're describing sounds more like ideology, which is generally a step or two removed from the underlying theory. Social scientists are themselves aware of the limitations around generalizability of any specific truth claim. It's mostly the pop-version that get a mind of their own and start getting applied uncritically. And the shift of expert opinion in the policy world from actual, practicing social scientists to political flacks and industry types has really ramped up this tendency.
Part of the challenge is that there is also lots of ideologically motivated funding in economics and social science that is attempting to put its fingers on the scales of academic inquiry.
>Was Endogenous Growth Theory the basis for higher education subsidies, or is that a different flavour of human capital theory?
Partly. Depends on whether you're talking about in the US context or a developing country context. In the latter, from the perspective of financial institutions like the World Bank it mostly guided where the loans were disbursed. Previously the focus was very much on infrastructure. Endogenous growth theory started encouraging them to pivot to investments in education and healthcare instead. One of the challenges is that infrastructure is fairly easy and politically popular (powerful people get to bid on the contracts and it creates a rich vein for cronyism and kickbacks). Education and healthcare take more mature organizational capacity and, once you start promising it, people start getting mad at you when you suck at it and vote you out.
In developed countries education subsidies are very old. Even high education was mostly viewed as a public responsibility until fairly recently when the risk was offloaded to students instead. American Land Grant universities, particularly the University of California school system, were an early case study to prove the value of education as a growth driver.
>> Advances in computing, data collection, and statistical methods have enabled levels of quantitative analysis around natural experiments that nobody thought possible even a few years ago.
I have to say I'm skeptical. What's the best study to change my mind?
>> What you're describing sounds more like ideology, which is generally a step or two removed from the underlying theory.
The relationship between ideology and social science theory is pretty much intractable, IMO. I think you could equally argue that theory is a step or two removed from the underlying ideology. This has pretty much always been the case, certainly true of the fields' founders. Maybe Khaldun was non ideological, but that's going back a long ways.
The point about social scientists being aware of the limitations around generalizability.... Again, I totally disagree. A non generalizable theory is a just so story, or punditry. Social scientists claim (or at least imply) generalizability, usually. Non generalizability is a retreat in the face of criticism.
IRL, an education in social science, at graduate level, at highly regarded schools, across social science disciplines... is training on how to string together an argument/analysis which generalizes theory, typologies, and whatnot. That is what social science is, in practice.
(I hope we're both taking these disagreements as academic and friendly. No mean spirit intended)
Freakonomics is a pop-Econ book that’s all about behavioral economics and really mainstreamed much of the field when it came out. There’s lots of methodological issues with individual studies but it’s a good primer on how to think like an economist.
> The relationship between ideology and social science theory is pretty much intractable, IMO.
It’s really not. But I’m not really sure that’s a productive avenue to go down so I’m going to leave it.
> The point about social scientists being aware of the limitations around generalizability.... Again, I totally disagree. A non generalizable theory is a just so story, or punditry. Social scientists claim (or at least imply) generalizability, usually. Non generalizability is a retreat in the face of criticism.
No. Caveating the limitations of any particular study or finding is simply an exercise in humility about what is known and what is uncertain. “Limits of generalizability” doesn’t mean it’s non-generalizable. It just means it’s not infinitely generalizable time all circumstances. Punditry is the opposite of that.
I’m starting to have trouble following what you believe “theory” means if you’re interpreting it in these ways.
> IRL, an education in social science, at graduate level, at highly regarded schools, across social science disciplines... is training on how to string together an argument/analysis which generalizes theory, typologies, and whatnot. That is what social science is, in practice.
Ah, training on how make an argument and do analysis is the core of what academics is. I have no idea what “generalizes theory and whatnot” is supposed to mean. Most of the work people actually do is looking into case studies and comparing them against each other, doing metaanalysis on a variety of studies, or doing empirical research or hypothesis testing on a particular situation or an interesting data set. There are some groundbreaking works that manage to piece these together into grand theories, but that’s a small minority to what social scientists actually do. The lions share is just looking into “what happens to Y when X changes?”
I’m actually going to turn this back around on you. Human beings are complex and society is even moreso. I would argue that an education in hard STEM fields leaves their practitioners incapable of coping with uncertainty, evaluating the quality of evidence, or understanding how to make reasonable inferences in the face of ambiguity. The implication that theories, to be useful, must be infinitely generalizable regardless of extenuating circumstances or that outcomes much be 100% certain to be valid shows this tendency. But these assumptions aren’t actually congruent with how the real world works. The real world is messy, and collected data in it even moreso. Being able to speak about it requires a certain level of judgement and capacity for discrimination that lets you cut through the fog of ambiguity. Rather than weaknesses, these are the skills that social science equips people with.
Like you say, I think we've reached an end point on most of this.
FWIW, I think we're using the term "theory" in exactly the same way, given that we've discussed half a dozen examples.
I'll just respond to the last point. Human minds and societies are complex. The job is hard. So, what to do? The modern conception of the scientific method (eg a scientific theory must be falsifiable) was laid out most famously by Karl Popper.
His work was adopted as a framework by hard sciences. But, it was intended as a criticism of social sciences of his day... notably marxist & freudian fields. The methods of reasoning in these fields. Social science was, I believe, deeply affected by Popper's work. But, I think the direction was entirely wrong.
The conclusion should been to abandon scientific pretext when it is not possible. If what you are doing is philosophy, punditry or what Popper called "justificationism," treat it as a nonscientific avenue. Non scientific fields are valid. Non scientific theories presented as scientific are not. They're pseudoscience.
The replication crisis in psychology should have been a wake up call. I fear that the loss of position social sciences are experiencing (as you say, they've lost a lot of pull in policy formation) will make things worse, not better.
The way social sciences influence the world these days is mostly undergraduate education. That's a lot of influence still, but it's also a refuge from criticism. The only remaining threat to a social science theory is prevailing biases within its own field, because it's unlikely to leave the classroom.
Look, leaving economics aside... what are some tangible achievements of social sciences in recent generations? What has behavioural economics or psychology taught us, that we use to some benefit?
> The conclusion should been to abandon scientific pretext when it is not possible.
It’s not “not possible.” It’s only applicable under constrained context. Again I point back to certain styles of education leaving people underequipped to cope with ambiguity. That doesn’t mean the methods aren’t useful for understanding systems or processes.
> Non scientific theories presented as scientific are not.
This is just descending into self-referential semantic hair splitting. You’ve decided on a definition of “science” and you’ve decided that this definition is what social scientists must be trying to hew to based on no direct experience of your own on what social scientists actually do. It sounds like you’re conflating “wonkbloggers,” like 538 or Vox, with what actual social scientists do. (And these bloggers shoddy methods are something social scientists have been complaining about for years). But this is like taking Michio Kaku’s pop-sci writing as representative of how physics works.
It’s also not clear why it’s a hill to die on whether something is “scientific.” It’s not social scientists who worry about this, most of them are comfortable with ambiguity and understand what contexts conclusions can be drawn and when they can’t. Nobody actually cares what’s scientific or not except people who are deeply invested in the primacy of positivist scientism as a source of truth.
But that fixation is almost exclusively from non-social scientists. There is reason to doubt your sincerity when saying that non-scientific methods are valid, considering that you have, in the same breath, referred to these methods of analysis with pejorative terms like “punditry” or “just so stories.”
> The replication crisis in psychology should have been a wake up call.
The “replication crisis” isn’t even that germane in most social sciences. It’s more of a thing in clinical trials so I don’t know why you would expect it to be a wake up call to sociologists or political scientists.
> Look, leaving economics aside... what are some tangible achievements of social sciences in recent generations? What has behavioural economics or psychology taught us, that we use to some benefit?
All of public policy and policy analysis is predicated on various social science frameworks. This is a bizarre question. Where do you think explanations of things like the effects of women’s education of fertility or the most efficacious criminal justice approaches come from?
The idea that the primary area of influence is in teaching undergraduates is downright bizarre. Who do you think staffs the State Department or sits on advisory committees at think tanks?
OK. Undisputed is an overstatement, unfair even. There's actually quite a lot of action in this space, and the publications/excavations are recent.
You do see my point though, no? I think many/most history teachers don't really know much about alternative "how it all began" history, and those old narratives are still certainly the history 101 interpretation. If high school teaches neolithic history, they probably teach a historical materialism version.
As the evidence stands currently, that's no longer evidence based.
First, there is massive difference between "theory", especially academic theory and what high school teacher teaches. That is completely different claim.
Second, no I don't really think so. The kind of worst about high school neolithic all history I can say is that what I seen of it was terminally boring.
I think we may be talking past each other somewhat. By "marxist theory" I meant the timeline and cause-effect chains that are generally in the textbooks, history books what your likely to be taught in college, etc. Marxist interpretation would have been a better choice of words.
I agree about high school (and younger) history being boring. I hated it. Don't even remember what periods they taught.
We are not talking past each other. Neither colleges nor high schools are teaching marxist interpretation of history in their history courses. The exception are courses like "marxist interpretation of x" which indeed teaches what marxist interpretation of event x is.
Also, I suspect that you dont know what Marxist interpretation of historical events is.
It is a consideration in the field of political economy or development economics. Development economists rarely get invited to talk about domestic politics in OECD countries though so the focus is all on developing ones.
I'm not sure what you mean by "actual scientific articles," but I mean stuff that's generally published in economics, policy, psychology or other "social science" related journals.
I'm not commenting on which is "scientific" in a Popperian sense. I'm not sure any of these publications clear that bar.
Questions of scope and/or magnitude is one of the moving goalposts. Scope is implied to be very broad in most contexts, limited in more critical contexts. This theory only applies to preschools in this neighborhood.
The 2018 Nobel Laureate for Economics was about "Endogenous growth theory," a theory of how human capital, innovation, and knowledge contribute to economic growth. Is that a small scope?
The most influential social science book of the last few years was "Capital in the 21st century" which is a theory of income and wealth gaps. Is that small in scope?
Ultimately, a theory that can't be generalized iss not really a theory, in a scientific sense. It's punditry.
> Building is hardest and costliest when population density is high, when 'land' (or equivalent resource) is in small parcels, and property rights are strong - but those are exactly the conditions that lots of people love to live in.
I don't think this holds up. Throughout history the greatest examples of "building" in all domains have occurred in these conditions. I don't think the impediments to building are related to scarcity. The author is making this point as well, it doesn't matter where a person is located, a city, a frontier, a farm, or a village, what matters are the attitudes and beliefs of the people in those settings. It's the old adage "where there's a will, there's a way". I think this is a better explanation of why it is so difficult to build in some places _at the moment_ because it also explains why it was not difficult to build in the same places at different times in the past. The question here should be how do we effectively teach people to think this way en masse despite their current circumstances or past training?
The article is kicking off with the implicit belief that America is the greatest at building. So if America is no longer the greatest at building, we have to investigate where America went wrong. If New Zealand is bad at building but was always at building, there isn’t much to say. But if America has fallen, we have to look at the reasons, specific to America, to find out why.
I'd watch out for this. If a historian came to you and said "I have a heuristic, a code smell for programs" you'd be incredibly skeptical. It is easy to develop strong feelings about social science that seem right and may even be right, but probably a better bet is to reach out to experts and verify these approaches.
The question is whether the writer has any clue what they are talking about either.
Also known as the "Gell-Mann Amnesia" effect, where you realize how terribly inaccurate reporting is on topics you know well, but assume that surely they do better for other topics.
They used to have a Wikipedia article about it, but I guess the censors decided it didn't warrant mention anymore. Here is a random article I found on the topic [1].
A redirect to the article for Michael Crichton of Jurassic Park fame; unfortunately it appears to have been removed from that page as well. It looks like Crichton is the one who actually came up with the effect, and named it after Gell-Man after discussing it with him.
It is surely the case that a large amount of secondary writing on academic subjects is bad. This is why I suggest getting feedback from experts instead of building heuristics about topics outside ones field of expertise.
This detracts from the point of the article. The author is not writing a program, nor is he aiming for "perfect correlation". He is noting a series of observations and proposing some connections between them, as is often the case with writings about society. If we take a level of rigor that works for sub-100KLOC algorithms running on dozens of cores and try to apply it to millions of interacting neural networks, each with 100 billion neurons, there will hardly be any writings about society.
It’s partly the reason they’ve decreased their homeless population by 54% since 2011, yes.
I’d probably point to the concerted efforts between the housing authorities and the regional VA office that, with combined HUD & VA funding, essentially ended homelessness among veterans in the city first though.
Kinda unfair to compare them
to other American cities tbh, it’s always easier to do stuff like this when you can actually build.
Inflation is influenced by minimum wage. If wages rise but people are competing for access to an artificially restricted housing market, all that will happen is house price and rents go up to absorb the increase; the only people better off will be landlords and homeowners with a larger house than they need.
Workers are living in tents both because wages are miserable AND because police and building codes keep them from building small shacks and because land prices are disproportionately high.
China took Japan's model and instructed it thousands of local banks to make loans for productive investment. So China financed a shit ton of companies and people to start building.
It most certainly is a lack of money that prevents building.
The best thing you can do for building is to give smart people a lot of money and get the fuck out of the way.
Its because they aren't expected to finance the building themselves. Its the insane expectation that the destitute will be able to drive economic development that keeps making the housing divide, amongst other class divides, so massive in the USA.
People are not "effectively being paid the same as previous generations". Unlike wages, many primary necessities have grown in cost at rates much higher than inflation in the US (housing, education, health care).
IANAEconomist, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt.
My general impression is that people haven't changed much, and the American "can-do" spirit is alive and well. There are some problems with zoning laws, and many folks are financially clueless or even irresponsible (don't have savings accounts and such), but to me the limiting factor seems to be capital.
> Your complaint is that people are effectively being paid the same as those prior generations.
I think you might have gotten confused by how the article uses "the same purchasing power" in a few places. It's actually saying (and again, I Am Not An Economist) is that gains from increasing productivity have not gone to the middle class.
In any event, my point is that if people had more money they would build more.
I don't find the "cultural stagnation" thesis very compelling.
It's not a foregone conclusion that gains from increased productivity go to the worker. Suppose someone builds an extremely advanced machine where all the worker needs to do is push a button, where in the past they needed ten years of training to do the same work with hand tools and the skills to do it were rarer, even if they produced less. The gains would rationally go to the person selling the machine. In fact this is what has happened and why Wintel etc sucked up a lot of the gains, creating so many of those rich people these kinds of articles complain about.
Also this whole statistical view of people is flawed. For the kinds of jobs where increased productivity should go to the worker, perhaps it did, and we call them rich now and move the goalpost to exclude them.
As for cultural changes, if you compare to other countries there are clear differences today. I think of government participation broadly as a "theraputic" institution. You contribute to something larger to make yourself feel good. This could mean building things or cleaning up trash etc. In the US however, for the last few generations this disproportionately means vote/protest for social progress agendas (in the eyes of the citizen), such as to impose "fairness" or lifestyle change. People's civic energy is basically channeled into just drama as the fight goes back and forth producing nothing.
I think this is an old complaint about capitalism and a government that works to support capitalists, which dates from the 19th century. Most of the resources of society end up controlled by a minority of capitalists and the government, and capitalists generally find better profits from providing goods to the wealthy instead of the poor. Hence, we have construction of luxury apartments and hotels, while people in the same city are homeless. It's described in the works of Kropotkin, etc., and nothing has really changed. Whether his solution, anarcho-communism, is actually practical remains largely untested, but he makes a fair point that society could easily satisfy the basic needs of the entire population, if desired, even with late 19th century technology, and even more easily today.
In fact, horrible as it is, being homeless is a great incentive to build (source: I have been homeless). The realisation that everything I depended on to keep me safe and warm had failed, and that I could really only rely on myself to do that, was a life-changer.
Giving people money will keep them dependent. People in that situation don't need handouts. They need the ability and opportunity to improve their situation themselves. For me, that was relaxed rules about hiring casual construction labour. I don't know what a homeless person would need now to improve their situation. But I'm willing to bet it's more likely to be the removal of constraints rather than handouts.
I was homeless to for a while (emotional and social problems, I'm feeling much better.) I get what you're saying. But that's you. I relied on all kinds of people, including several churches who gave free meals. God bless them.
Eventually, one of my relatives died and left my mom some money and she paid for some therapy and some of it worked and I went on to be a more-or-less functioning adult, with a job and home and all that.
YMMV
> Giving people money will keep them dependent.
There's a danger of that for some people, I agree, but I still think that dependent well-fed housed people are a step up from dependent hungry homeless people.
> People in that situation don't need handouts. They need the ability and opportunity to improve their situation themselves.
I say they need both: give them food and a place to live and education or training or therapy or whatever they need to develop the ability and find or create the opportunities. USA is a ridiculously wealthy nation, we could afford take care of our own if we just prioritized it.
> being homeless is a great incentive to build
I believe that people like to build. Look at kids, eh? LEGO bricks?
Frankly I think it's severely messed up that our society uses homelessness as a stick to keep people in line. I.e. "Don't lose your job! You'll wind up on the street!"
I get that. But for a lot of those problems, the only person who can solve them is the person themselves. Addiction being the prime example; the only person who can stop you being addicted to something is you. Other people can help, sure, but at the end of the day it's your willingness to change that counts.
Four stories over podiums would alleviate much of high rents in California. Lack of willing and able renters is not why they’re not built. Holding fixed the legal supply of housing makes apartment pricing behave in the same way as land rents.
It refers to the common construction design of new, low-rise apartment buildings: four stories of light wood framing over a “podium” built on the ground of a much stronger (i.e. more expensive) material, usually concrete. It’s considered the most cost efficient building style as compared to true high rises which require steel construction per code.
Once you are aware of it, my guess is you’ll see it everywhere.
You can see the podium is a base of concrete and above it is 4 stories of wood framing construction. The black parts are already wrapped but you see the plywood in the top right.
I'm not sure how I feel about that particular building.
I don't like it aesthetically (despite being into most Brutalist architecture.) But that's a matter of taste.
It doesn't integrate into the environment very well. For example, the Pacific ocean is right there, but the design seems to ignore that. They should (IMO, IANAArchitect) have designed it so that more residents had better views, and one of the roof-top lounge things should be facing it (with wind breaks or even windows!) And there should be wind-power turbines on the roof, you have a nearly continuous wind coming off the ocean.
Despite all that, I think it's really instructional to compare that block to the surrounding blocks.
It shows what the Outer Sunset could be. It's downright weird that SF's Western coast is so underdeveloped. (Although I prefer it that way. I grew up here and it's kind of nice that the beach isn't all built up like the Marina district, or even Venice Beach in LA, or the waterfront in Seattle, or really almost anywhere.) Part of it is that SF is relatively young. Most places would have converted the area decades ago.
One thing though: I had a friend who lived at 46th and worked downtown, he moved to Oakland and his commute time was cut in half. There are reasons why the Sunset district is so sleepy. You meet a lot of people here that think the city ends at Twin Peaks.
We would have to build some sort of freeway if the Outer Sunset were to be converted to greater density.
The existing Muni lines would be sufficient to transit a large capacity of the Outer Sunset residents into downtown if they were given signal priority. The recent proposal to create a dedicated 2-3 car Muni subway line which Sunset residents have to transfer into at West Portal station is itself a huge improvement. Studies have shown that a large majority of Muni delays can be explained by the fact that trains share road space with cars that often obstruct them (and increase railway maintenance costs). Surface trains going into the subway make the problem worse, because an effective subway relies on reliable and precise train timings, but surface rail is unpredictable like a car because it shares space with cars.
The building likely doesn't have a roof deck because code and planning make that a very expensive proposition. Due to more recent planning code changes, roof decks under some circumstances count against the number of floors of housing you can build, so a builder is trading off units they can sell with the amenity value of a deck.
There is a really good point in this article that is imperfectly articulated. This "We do not have this impulse today." isn't being supported.
Learning how to do something well involves a lot of failures/failed experiments (eg, there is some interesting research on learning curves that goes into similar ideas at a massive scale).
Picking on an industry, the supply of great home builders will be reduced if there are not also many incompetent home builders. Incompetent home builders are regulated out of existence because it isn't safe, so statistically a couple of really great builders never learned their craft because they couldn't muck around doing stupid stuff so they went to become shopkeepers instead or something. Costs associated with homebuilding will also rise.
So it isn't that the impulse is lost, it is that when America was a great builder the people had no choice but to accept a lot of shoddy work, and in amongst all the dross a few of the experiments turned up aces. They wouldn't accept that today (even though it is probably a really strong strategy) because the median voter is risk averse to the point of hurting themselves.
In countries where house building is poorly regulated, you don't end up with lots of aces, the opposite happens, the overall standards are reduced even at the top end.
On the other hand, houses do tend to be safe enough even without regulatory oversight. I definitely think that the years that people in developed countries spend working and saving in pursuit of an expensive house built to code is not a good balance of life spent to life risk.
Learning how to do something well involves a lot of failures/failed experiments (eg, there is some interesting research on learning curves that goes into similar ideas at a massive scale).
Care to share some links?
Prying into your profile I see you asked HN, whithout much luck, something of the sort time ago. (would you mind pinging me? my email is in my profile)
Don't have any especially good case studies or rigorous papers but the effect makes sense to me. Lots of practice leads to order-of-magnitude improvement, which suggests that a future-great system starts off producing some relatively questionable results.
> Prying into your profile I see you asked HN, whithout much luck, something of the sort time ago. (would you mind pinging me? my email is in my profile)
Thanks for the offer; won't take you up on it. I don't have spare time to read up on things like I once did.
It fell apart when he made his management/free individual comparison, and then went
> You see this in the difference quite clearly between Black Lives Matters on the one hand and the Civil Rights Movement on the other,
I'm flabbergasted. If there's one thing in recent times that is self-organizing, it's BLM protests. And before that, OWS.
That prompted me to re-read, with an eye towards "is this claim substantiated" any time he makes a claim, and no, most of the time, it isn't.
I'll pick another example: "Crises demanded organizing at the local level to try and meet the problem head on. We do not have this impulse today."
Yes, yes we do. The amount of ad-hoc work done to distribute food, rustle up PPE, deliver food to populations in need was truly amazing. On the larger scale there was the (bipartisan) #stayhome effort. The clear leadership the Seattle Flu Study took.
> in the America of the early 20th century, the default solution to any problem encountered was to assemble a coalition of Americans to defeat it.
[citation needed], counselor. The Great Depression didn't exactly have "coalitions of Americans" - it took the government to step in. (And needed it to step in - it turns out scale matters). No civil organizations sprang up to deal with the KKK in the '20s.
And so it continues. It's simply a "good old times" article, with little connection to facts. (As those articles always are, because the good old times weren't)
I think what’s less relevant here is “builder” vs. “non-builder” but whether or not governmental authority is properly hitched to the will of the citizens on average.
The vast distributed efforts by citizens to produce PPE that the government seemed incapable or unwilling to acquire seems to hint at some serious dysfunction.
I think that is part of the problem the author is getting it- the assumption that the government, especially the federal government, is the sole institution that can execute things. Historically, the argument goes, that didn't used to be the case. People self organized, but they organized into INSTITUTIONS, not just brief movements- the NAACP was formed in 1909.
I always think of my grandparents in these discussions. They had an enormously active civic life their entire lives- quite literally, my grandfather passed away at a church lecture. They helped build institutions like an anti-smoking organization, their church, or the local arts organization- not necessarily as leaders, but as the people who made things happen.
Boomers, Xers, and millenials... don't seem to do this. It's pretty well documented (see Bowling Alone).
I'm with the author here- our the ability to organize has been greatly diminished even as our ability to communicate has gone up. There are probably many reasons why- entertainment is far more plentiful and an alternative to civic engagement, maybe our existing institutions really are that good, the trained responses the author discuss. Whatever it is, I think it is a shame- participating in civic society is one the great joys in life, and I agree that the lack of participation saps something of the United States culture and success.
That being said, civic society doesn't operate in isolation. It tends to interact with government extensively, but it can lend legitimacy and guidance to government actions. You can see this at work with the government responses to the BLM movement- one of the great civic society triumphs of recent times, although a very different one then the author talks about.
The Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese responses were undergirded by large functional government bureaucracies, trust me. It wasn't town hall democracies and local small-scale stuff like that, that arranged mass functional responses to the crisis. Korea and Taiwan have civic society and the PRC really doesn't, the thing that makes them different is government competence and government operational capability.
Pandemic response is extremely within the wheelhouse of government.
Funny, I am just reading biography of Rosa Park and NAACP was not exactly popular organization in her life time. The parents did not wanted their children to be in youth wing and membership was low where she lived. She was incredibly frustrated by all that prior bus event blowing up.
NAACP also pushed government most of the time - the registering for vote, push to make school desegregation actually happen, letter writing about various criminal causes. They were not trying to do it without government, they were trying to make government do the right thing.
my understanding is that the US peak institutional involvement was 1959.
I link it to the strong trend of anti-authoritarianism and individualism that started to become current in the 50s & 60s. Today it manifests in the ancap and anarcho-communist ideologies most extremely, but it also manifests everywhere as trust breaks down and a general unwillingness to move in concert with others at a large scale is present.
Full agreement there. (Plus a side of vicious anti-science sentiment, with a good helping of a complete misunderstanding what "freedom" is)
I do believe that we as a society are currently trying to decide if we want to build something communal, or if we want to commit to extreme selfishness. It'd be more fun to read about it in a history book, but it sure is interesting.
I’d argue that America committed 100% to selfishness by the 1980s. This is when you begin to see community institutions begin to be replaced with private ones, all the way down to the destruction of community pools for private ones.
If only that dichotomy was reflected in our two political parties. But nope, we just have centrist "please preserve the status quo" candidate and right-wing "extreme selfishness" candidate. No builders allowed.
I understand the sentiment, but: Are you running for a local office? Are you engaged in changing election laws? If you're builder, building a better election system is a noble task, and one that requires tackling.
I wonder if the author is aware of the phenomenon of covid-19 mutual aid groups. If anything, I wish people were more willing to just find someone else who already organized instead of create the Local Neighborhood Organization For Laptops For SchoolChildren #254 so they can do their bit.
Not really. The America of today -- and particularly the current presidential administration -- is much more alike governments of the past. The American federal government of today has not entered any foreign wars and certainly not centralized any more leadership under the current administration, which is a far cry from what is typical. Usually, an emergency on the level of COVID would result in the federal government immediately attempting to seize power. Our current administration was extremely reluctant to do so, rather relying on the collective enterprise of individual Americans self organizing.
This is an... incredible narrative. Which country assassinated another country's military chief at the start of the year? Which superpower has its propaganda machine working overtime to foment sinophobia? Which federal government attempted to steal PPE from the states and stockpile it for other electorally relevant states, while totally controlling the fiscal response to the pandemic? Chemical weapons on citizens for a photo op?
Certainly sounds like a peace-loving administration that empowers the citizenry.
I think that a lot of the problem of not building things comes from profits being the only measure of what matters. The cultural imperative to get rich above all else. Some western technology companies changed at some point where a lot of them were driven by MBAs rather than engineers. They had no problem outsourcing everything to China in order to increase profits.
Building things was "too costly". But the cost was only measured in profits not in lost capability etc. The original founders of these companies built things because they wanted to build them and profit was a means to sustaining that. The Chinese are doing the same. The current culture in some western companies is weak and unsustainable in the same way that just eating sugar is weak and unsustainable.
But China's current dynamism kicked off when its government started to allow people to work to get rich. It seems very odd to claim we have more of that motive, indeed so much more that it makes a huge difference. It must be about the channels this motive has available to be directed into, I'd think. Does the invisible hand push you more to rent-seek or to build?
Yes that's exactly the problem. Thinking that if something is good, more of it has to be better. Its the same with regulation. Of course too much registration is bad but this fundamentalist idea that good will just emerge from pure free trade is nonsensical.
It's like seeing the benefits of event sourcing and then deciding that if we use that everywhere a stable system will just emerge.
Above you blame America's not building on the "motive to get rich above all else", contrasting China. I'm saying only that this seems a strange and unsupported place to pin the blame, going by what actually changed in China and in America. I didn't say that more greed causes more building; I'm saying that more greed for profits, as a candidate cause for less building, is not a relevant thing that has changed in the relevant way. It seems closer to the opposite in what I know about China's history.
Are you saying you think China went from too-low profit motive to the Goldilocks zone, while America went from Goldilocks to too high? Or is this really about something other than profit motive?
> In the 21st century, the main question in American social life is not "how do we make that happen?" but "how do we get management to take our side?" This is a learned response, and a culture which has internalized it will not be a culture that "builds."
this is a very powerful statement. as someone who just did this this week I feel very called out.
> I understand that the self-organizing neighborhood committee that removes a tree that blocks their street does not go on to build the Empire State Building. My argument is slightly different. To consistently create brilliant poets, you need a society awash in mediocre, even tawdry poetry. Brilliant minds will find their way towards poem writing when poem writing and poem reading is the thing that people do.
I don't necessarily agree with the "kids these days-ism" direction the article goes, or that Silicon Valley is a pinnacle of human achievement (to me, its the opposite), but I definitely agree that there needs to be a bottoms up approach and cultural shift to start moving again.
I have a friend that is very involved in state and national politics and is heavily invested in top down solutions, where systems and elected officials are the instruments of change. We frequently discuss our different perspectives and usually arrive at the notion that you need both top down and bottom up changes working in conjunction. I think this article is mostly trying to say that there's an imbalance of too much top down with not enough support from the bottom up.
Agreed. A possible "between the lines" reading of what the author is saying is that good overall solutions are formed from the balance of many different ones.
> One common mechanism was the establishment of an emergency committee— sometimes at the state level, other times at the level of the county or city— to deal with the overwhelming need for organization, communication, and cooperation among individuals, agencies, and organizations.
It's interesting they brought this up because the debate is often framed by the right as the "zippy right wing free market capitalists" versus "the slow and inefficient left." Yet from my perspective as a left-leaning individual, Republicans have tried to halt, sabotage and corrupt reasonable reform until it becomes unrecognizable -- i.e., Obamacare. Or they sabotage attempts to deal with COVID-19 reasonably.
If I'm being fair, it seems like institutional rot goes much deeper than any political ideology.
> It is striking to me how many of the old Silicon Valley builders—people of Andreeson's generation—were social outcasts in their youth. These people felt estranged from the established corsus honorum of American society.
Ironically, they were social outcasts because they spent the majority of their time focusing on stuff that mainstream society didn't understand the value of -- messing around with computers.
Now that internet-based businesses have become so profitable, upper middle class kids with sufficient aptitude are generally encouraged to mess around with computers. Someone tells their grandparents they want to be a software developer, and they're proud of them (thinking of all the people who've gotten rich off the internet), instead of saying "what the hell is that?"
> If I'm being fair, it seems like institutional rot goes much deeper than any political ideology.
I've taken to voting the past few election cycles, starting in 2016.
The fact that nothing ever changes and the media just screams louder and louder about their narrative of the week has right about put me off of caring about politics again.
> Republicans have tried to halt, sabotage and corrupt reasonable reform until it becomes unrecognizable
Republicans are conservatives which comes from
> averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values.
They don't want to change the system because they like the system (even if objectively the system is bad for them and they've been told it isn't or that Issue A is all that matters, ignore B through Z while we decimate you).
Single Issues are a huge facet of American politics and are used by both sides to divide people who have more in-common with each other than the groups in charge.
From an outsider perspective I frequently wonder why it's not more visible, I certainly see it my countries national politics though not to the same extent.
And even when people do realise there is a problem they then hang around waiting for the perfect single solution to fix it forever which is an ideal opportunity for politicians who don't want the problem fixing.
If I'm been ultra cynical (and I try not to be) as an example, Roe V. Wade been over-turned would be a disaster to the GOP, the promise to try to do so is far more powerful at getting people out to vote than actually doing it - which requires both doing it and then having to promise something else.
> Single Issues are a huge facet of American politics and are used by both sides to divide people who have more in-common with each other than the groups in charge.
Because the shared values are dressed up in completely different narratives. I find talking to my conservative friend, he shares all of the concerns about problems with the justice system and inequality, but when I roll it together as "racism" he vehemently objects.
We're told the other side sees things dramatically differently, though. Or that the want to kill babies.
> I find talking to my conservative friend, he shares all of the concerns about problems with the justice system and inequality, but when I roll it together as "racism" he vehemently objects.
If the issue is racism, that means that a fix for the justice system's problems won't affect him. You're implicitly saying that any mistreatment he's experienced at the hands of the police is the way things should be, and that it shouldn't be fixed.
Saying the problem is racism is saying that only a fraction of the US deserves a solution, and it shouldn't be too hard to see why some people will find that disagreeable.
That sounds like quite strongly motivated reasoning. Basically, I can not accept that other people have specific big problem, because then resources would go toward problem I don't have.
Therefore if there is both problem with racism and other one, racism can't exist untill all problems touching me are solved first.
I mean, I can see how people who have the other problem would find him obstacle to solution to their problems.
And "this must have been caused by racism" sounds like motivated reasoning to me!
If, instead, police 1. treat people equally when encountered 2. encounter demographics in proportion to the crimes committed by that demographic and 3. african americans commit a significantly higher number of crimes per capita... There wouldn't be a way to make the police less racist - since they already treat people equally - but police reform could be effective at reducing the brutality encountered by everyone. Making things a police racism problem (african americans might commit more crimes due to racism from groups other than the police) then just makes it so that no progress can be made on the "police beating people up and killing them" problem, because the police aren't racist.
The above might not be true! But it's believed by a lot of people, and has a fair bit of academic support. (for instance, there are studies showing that police officers were faster to shoot a white man than an african american man when they were taking the same actions - the opposite of what I'd expect if police treatment differences were driven by racism)
I was quite convinced by studies I have seen, mostly those collected by Radley Balko that this your first paragraph is not the case.
But here, we are arguing about opinions on what is going on and not by "you should understand this person can not accept racism as explanation because he would not be benefiting from it".
There, I was asked to understand that reasoning on itself, if it is not benefiting me it can not be true, which is completely different then this.
I'm saying that there's a lot of reasons that someone might respond badly to being told that the problem is racism. One is that the problem genuinely might not be racism, as I've tried to say earlier in this thread. Another is that systemic racism is a society-wide thing, and so by blaming a problem on it you indirectly blame the person you're talking to. (or at least they perceive it as such, even though systemic racism is supposed to be the idea that the system can be racist despite the individuals not being racist) A third is pattern-matching past instances of people saying "the problem is racism" to unpleasant/ineffective outcomes for them - for instance, implicit bias training (which while IIRC there is evidence in favor of implicit bias being a thing, training actually working to reduce it is on far shakier foundations). I'm sure there are more, and not all of them are "racist conservative refuses to accept racism is the problem because they don't benefit from solving racism".
On the other hand, "the problem is racism" is very morally easy/acceptable in leftish circles, and saying the problem is anything else often gets a negative response (this thread existing might be counted as evidence here) - providing motivation to call things racism regardless of the truth of the matter... (This is not necessarily the case, of course - just trying to show that motivated reasoning goes both ways)
But the guy in original story I responded to had one specific concrete reason - if it is racism then solution does not help me. And I was supposed to find that understandable.
I was respousing to that particular logic of that particular guy who was much less reasonable then he believed himself. I was not responding to all the possible reasons of all the people in the world.
"Single Issues are a huge facet of American politics and are used by both sides to divide people who have more in-common with each other than the groups in charge."
that's a very good point. Sometimes i fantasize about what changes could have been made if the Tea Party and the Occupy Wallstreet people realized they were two sides of the same coin back in 2009. Both groups were quickly divided and subverted, set against each other, and destroyed out of fear of them coming to that realization IMO.
I was reading the original article and thinking tomyself ’am I feeling this’. Apple and Google came to my mind, they are the governments in digital business whose regulations and tantrums I have to abide by. Past are the times this kind of business could have thrived without restrictions. Maybe we should build a reasonable choise to them?
These companies compete with each other, but they work together to implicitly suppress anyone who may join the league and compete with them.
The 30% platform tax is a fantastic example. A giant will always win, or be able to stall a fast-growing company, if they can tax 30% of the revenue and build a competitor without this headwind. Even allowing apps that require people to sign up outside the app, that is a significant growth and conversion hurdle.
Advertising-based apps are untaxed and hence incentivised. However, Google and Facebook have acquired and monopolised the market so that you really can't make good money unless you go through them -- and they get to take a 40% clip. Thus, FAAMG will always grow faster than you because collectively enforce a tax on anyone who might be able to challenge them.
FAAMG is the modern day OPEC, just relying on subtly and game theory instead of outright cartel meetings.
Except that these cloud providers are trying to undercut each other as much as possible all the time, and you really honestly don't have to use them to build your service if you don't want to.
If you want a bunch of super convenient features like elastic compute, you will, but they didn't have those features when they built their flagship products.
Public cloud providers are very much in the customer acquisition phase. There are still a lot of on-prem datacenters out here that they are trying to compete over for business.
Once the entire customer base is locked in more or less, the cartel effect will kick in.
The pivotal moment in USA's history was WW II. The USA was the only major country _not_ ravaged by the war. Once the war was over, the other countries had to focus on recovery and rebuilding. The USA supplied the materials and goods for those needs. It was a great time to be the USA.
But now that the playing field remains level and that historic outlier long gone, the USA's self-proclaimed tag line (i.e., "greatest country in the history of the world") is more myth than it is reality. The sociopolitical fallout from perpetuating the myth,and not keeping pace with reality, isn't over yet.
From the original article of the article:
>You see it in housing and the physical footprint of our cities.
Isn't the problem with housing not "willingness to build" but actually heavy regulations that penalize builders to favor the "already-have" people? It seems to me like a shallow argument to point it toward "willingness". Seems more like bad incentive systems.
The overall message I agree with; we should build more. But the root cause of it, my take, is not "willingness" but in expectation and reaction to failure.
Most of these regulation was put in place with well intention. Some landlord/teacher/constructor made a shoddy work (mistake or with malicious intent), people make demands "to be better" after media outcry, policy maker put regulation in place. Unintended consequences is that landlords/teachers/constructors that was doing nothing wrong (and people that cause honest mistakes) also get penalized.
Same attitude can be seen outside regulators and policy makers; On the internet: the entire "cancel culture" or social media witch hunt is all about finding a mistake someone did, ascribe intention to it and shame them to inaction. In hiring, new grads are expected to have a work-experience equivalent skill-set already gained in university. (Effectively penalizing allowance of mistake by hiring someone that have to learn at work.)
Our "willingness" seems to be the same but "expectation" seems to have been blown out of proportion, and the fallout of failure to meet this expectation is constantly growing, so less and less people would even like to try.
As a european, I don't understand why the european response is seen as significantly better on this front than the US', especially in the context of Andreeson's criticism.
I mean, Europe has had some of the worst outbreaks, mortality rates, failures of the hospital system, elderly care... The horror of peak covid in northern Italy was, largely, a preventable failure.
We also see a similar helplessness when it came to actions that required "building." Ability or inability to do "lockdown" well varied, but that's not building.
The one obvious thing that did need "build" was testing, contact tracing and such. Very few countries managed to scale up testing fast, even by now.
I found the Andreesen article interesting in the first few paragraphs, where he says, essentially, that you need to look beyond your own city, state, or national government, since all of Western society was caught unprepared for this. Then he spends almost the entire rest of the essay talking about aspects of America specifically, as if they were an explanation for the problem. It's like he didn't read the start of his own essay. Whatever the source of the problem, it cannot be something uniquely American, as France, the U.K., Italy, Spain, Belgium, etc. all had the same (or greater) state of unpreparedness, as measured by per capita mortality.
But, if you look at countries like South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, etc. that had far lower per capita mortality, it's not clear what they have in common. I think it is more important for us to be asking "why were those countries better off, what do they have in common?" than to be trying to answer what we should be doing different. You can't find the right answer until you've asked the right question.
Most of the things that Andreesen says we should be building (like many more nuclear reactors, or mile-higher skyscrapers to increase population density) are, to say the least, not something for which there is a consensus. I wouldn't want to see most of what he lists. Including, by the way, flying cars, which would make our current fatality rate from transportation even higher.
We are larger and more diverse. It's like the difference between a lean small company and a bloated corporation. The reasons why SmallCo A and MegaCorp B are different could be infinitely variable, but at the population level, it's generally agreed that the differences between the small company and mega corporation populations are simply due to scale.
If you want people to build, do what the Chinese do (who learned it from the Japanese). Give smart people lots of money and get out of the way. China told it's thousands of regional banks to lend towards productive purposes. This was called "Window Guidance".
The best thing you can do is give smart people a lot of money and get the fuck out of the way. There are three ways to do this; Bank lending, government spending, and private equity.
The problem in the west is that the majority of lending goes into asset purchases (buying existing wealth) instead of new production. One reason is that very few large banks make most of the loans. Government spending on high technology and research has also been declining over 30 years.
The reason people build today in Silicon Valley is private equity is funding projects (giving smart people money and getting out of the way). The problem with Silicon Valley is that private equity is a drop in the bucket compared to the capacity of bank lending or even government spending. In fact most of the tech, including the fact that Silicon Valley exists in the first place, was because of federal government spending. (fyi Google started as a government grant, google maps, waymo)
Lets look at the USA. There are 15k Banks in the US but the majority of lending happens in the top 3. The US can just instruct it's thousands of local banks to lend for projects instead of real-estate/asset purchases and suddenly you will have a lot of people with money to build things.
Alan Kay who was at Xerox Parc, which is estimated to have produced trillions in wealth cost only 100 million dollars, says that Parc worked because smart people were given money and management stayed out of the way. That they invested in people.
In fact, the vast majority of high technology was funded this way. Government gave labs lots of money and they created computers, the internet, rockets, GPS, AI, etc etc etc.
So a combination of government spending + bank lending can kickstart building.
Lots of smart people out there can't build because of the lack of funds. Give these people money! Let them build! Don't make them do a dog and pony show in front of VCs about WHAT they are going to build. Just invest in people and stay out of the way.
> The problem in the west is that the majority of lending goes into asset purchases (buying existing wealth) instead of new production.
I'm not sure I agree with this. A lot of lending is for mortgages, and a lot of those go into new construction, not purchases of existing buildings. In my area, there is a ton of vacant office space that has been built over the past decade or so because of the availability of cheap loans for new construction. The problem is that it was new construction that was not needed--hence the buildings are still sitting vacant years after completion.
In other words, I think the problem is not that lending is being done for asset purchases instead of new production, but that lending is being done for the wrong new production--producing things that nobody wants instead of things people do want. That misallocates resources and creates shortages of things that are actually wanted. Imagine if all the resources that went into building those vacant office buildings had gone into making PPE for disease protection instead.
And in summer 2019 when we were there a lot was being built, repaired and improved all over the place infrastructure wise, most likely expectimg the now canceled 2020 Olympics.
> First, the TLDR version: In the 21st century, the main question in American social life is not "how do we make that happen?" but "how do we get management to take our side?" This is a learned response, and a culture which has internalized it will not be a culture that "builds."
> The real question is whether we will be able to rebuild a building culture. I believe it is possible; Silicon Valley has shown that building sub-cultures can persist even in the face of general malaise. I am afraid this is a long term project. It may involve wrenching cultural authority out of the hands of existing arbiters and pulling it towards places like Silicon Valley, where men and women have not forgotten how to get things done. This may require building up the sort of cultural, media, and political infrastructure that exists along the Acela Corridor, just divorced from the patronage networks that currently keep things anchored in Washington and New York. Tech titans who care about these things should begin thinking seriously about what it would take to begin political and social experiments in the places closest to them: San Fransisco and its metro, other towns and cities in the state, perhaps California itself.
Hilarious that the capital of ad-tech and useless app proliferation is considered “Building things”.
You want builders, go blue collar. Machinists, masons, mechanics and teachers. They know how to get * done. Not Stanford CS grads ensconced in their golden FAANG coffins.
If you demand the things to be impressive in order to count, you can not build culture of building. You will build culture of impressing. And impressing in most cases requires a lot of money thrown on pr.
This is so true. I'm more impressed by the focused and successful long-term (~20 year) plan of revitalization of the local downtown than I am by most things out of Silicon Valley. It started with a cheesy video [1] and now you can go find small businesses [2][3][4] operating in what used to be the hollowed out husks of a past era.
It started from a dying post-WW2 textile town and now it's showing up in movies and TV shows as an idyllic small town. It's not even that kind of idyllic small town. The local paper's editor wrote articles in favor of marriage equality, trans rights, and racial equality and still hasn't been run out of town.
One is Neural Machine Translation, as embodied by, for example, the new Google Translate. For many language pairs you can get automated translation that is actually mostly plausible. It's an incredible aid to global communication.
And those are just the high-tech, high-profile projects.
Even a mundane bridge near a small town saves thousands of people a day of making a detour. This might not sound 'impressive', but imagine a bridge that gets used by just a thousand people a day and that replaces a detour that takes 15 minutes longer. That's a 1000 people * 0.25 hours * 2 times a day = 500 human hours saved per day, or over 180.000 hours saved per year. With a lifespan of 50 years equals that to close to 10 million(!) hours or 4500 'working years' saved. This is an example of just a small bridge near a small town, just imagine the benefit of larger bridges (and other infrastructure projects) near the big cities.
I mean, it's been about a decade since Silicon Valley invented the iPhone. Things take a while to produce clear, unambiguous transformations of the world.
The problem is I’m older now, I’m 40 years old, and this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t.
That’s going to break people’s hearts.
I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.
These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that. But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light – that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important.
[…]
Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.
The idea that the iPhone didn't change the world is just so strange I'm not sure how to engage with it. There's a whole new category of device that billions of people own, and we're saying that didn't matter?
Ironically, San Francisco is known as the city that refuses to build, because the voluntary associations refuse to let it happen.
I'll save my belief in the Bay Area being a real change agent for when I see real change happening in their systems.
I think the author of the article is on to something. I'm not sure precisely that the author has all points right, but directionally and at least fuzzily, it feels right.
I think the title and vocabulary used should be centered more on resource utilization rather than the build metaphor.
This is because we have a lot of capability (which is stated multiple times by many authors). We just have a poor system to funnel those capabilities to the right places.
This conversation reminds me of startup growing pains when there is dysfunctional org structure and communication lines. I'll reference some reading material for those who are seriously interested in learning more:
The basic idea is that hierarchy/structure is needed to allocate resources in a more complex way. BUT American values has traditionally gone away from an explicit hierarchical structure and instead tends towards a flat org structure. The issues described all sound like issues that come from a poorly run flat organization, or an organization at a pragmatist stage (if using the vocabulary in the 2nd link) - mainly that hierarchy is implicit and there is still people at the top, its just hidden and undocumented how to get there or how changes happens.
To me, it makes sense to look into organization theory literature as a direction for potential solutions and try to fit them into our societal context.
===
Another way to describe the article's point is the fact that we were once the employees of America, but have now become the shareholders. The wild west era is characterized by the people not being separate from the livelihood of their community. The town is a self contained unit where everyone in the town is helping to keep the town running, and every townsman has a role to play in order to keep the town lively.
Nowadays however, it seems that there is a distinct line between the people running the town and the rest of the town. The actors are not the townsfolk; they are the bureaucrats, the designated representatives, the people put in charge. The rest of us are spectators, benefactors, shareholders benefitting from their work but effectively cut off from participating in it. They are the clergy and we are the laity.
This is either built into the culture over a long period of time, or there's some pernicious systematic law that pushes mature ecosystems into a clergy-laity state. Either way, both explanations need an active structural solution to combat it.
I believe it might just be that we are used to safe incremental building now.
For example, building a feature on top of a successful product will get 5% gain with 80% certainty.
Building something completely new will give 10x gain with 2% certainty.
Management is more likely to favor the 5% gain because it gives safe returns and they can explain it well to whoever they are reporting to.
Also, I believe the same applies to startups. A founder has to explain crazy bets to investors, employees and everyone in the company. That's notnas easy as it sounds.
If we want more builders, we should work on the disincentives that builders face.
The original American builders weren't saddled by a progressive tax system where they were penalized according to their degree of success.
Perhaps we're witnessing Rand's strike of the mind in slow motion. The headwinds to building in public are so strong that the builders have retreated to build things in private, no longer sharing their gifts with the world.
But we do build things. Those things are software. Software has sucked Ali The air out of the room. Our top talent is sprinting away their life building adtech and SaaS, not buildings and spaceships.
Hard to believe Andreessen can't see this as he's part of the "problem" I'd you think it's a problem.
Software has eaten the world, meatspace is in second place now.
Total (federal) receipts are also relatively unchanged as a percentage of GDP since 1955. On top of that there is A LOT more GDP to go around. The real differences are source of revenue (Payroll taxes massively up, corporate income tax down) and the spending of the income (basically, anything that isn't Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid).
We could potentially spend like the 1950s, but it'll be a tough sell to cut Social Security and Medicare in half or more. You might get some right wingers behind doubling the military budget though.
And actually, if weight by quality of years lived, almost certainly worse off.
(That's a British paper, but let's say US and UK are roughly equal.)
This is, I think, because we're basically poisoning ourselves w/ poor diet, then trying to mitigate w/ medical care.
Probably most people would more or less agree with the above statement, but then you'd find very little agreement about what exactly about our diet makes it so unhealthy. (I think the #1 culprit is excessive linoleic acid.)
Well, also because of the societal trap of health insurance.
If you have health insurance, you're (hopefully) not paying for your medical costs. So the medical costs get jacked up- after all, you, the buyer, don't front the bill.
If nobody had health insurance, medicine would be cheaper. Of course, for every individual who can afford it, health insurance is a good choice (individually).
I think here's exactly your problem. All the freedom (to discretionaly spend) is now at the top, compared to the 1955. Today, people formally do get the money, but immediately they have to spend them again up on the medical care, rent, education and other required social services. (And debt service - I think debt servitude also plays a role in this.)
On the other hand, you tax corporations less. So the corporations (which are controlled by a small group at the top) have all the freedom to spend. But what would they buy? Will their spending increase their profit?
That's why you are not "building society" anymore - concentration of wealth. And as a result, people do have less freedom to spend (less money), and they will not engage in interesting endeavors.
I was visiting one of the dams at TVA yesterday. It was a beautiful day for running on the river trails, and because this is 2020 and I am addicted to my cellphone - I was looking up on the Wikipedia article on TVA. TVA is a huge, massive behemoth - but this lines from the Wikipedia page caught my attention:
>> Opponents, such as Dean Russell in The TVA Idea, in addition to condemning the project as being socialistic, argued that TVA created a "hidden loss" by preventing the creation of "factories and jobs that would have come into existence if the government had allowed the taxpayers to spend their money as they wished."
Now Dean Russell is an Austrian school economist, and his assertion here has no factual backing here. No evidence is ever given. And I was wondering, how much building has been also been stalled today by the fetishization of free-market economics?
> He enjoys what he has as a tenant, without any feeling of ownership or thought of possible improvement.
I read this sentence and I think it carries a lot of truth. I think it's not hard to believe that people today just don't "own" the USA like they did before. Literally, home ownership has been in decline for generations [1]. Millennials are in debt [2], and younger generations go longer without even having a family to root them in [2].
Back in my home country you stay in your city— in the USA everyone seems to be moving about all the time; first for school, then for the job. Morale wise, patriotism has been stained by rampant nationalism, so who wants to own that title? What's the "American" identity, when everyone clings to their differences? I've met people born and raised in the USA who introduce themselves as Salvadorian, Venezuelan, Japanese before saying they are American, because in the USA that's what they are— something else first, then American.
Moreover, it's easy to be disappointed with Americanism. Generational memory exists. People built last century expecting a better future this century, but capitalism and irresponsibility failed to make it happen. This country built roads and bridges it cannot afford to maintain [3], a health care system that bankrupts people and sells them addictions, an economy that disproportionately favors the rich, and a government that has spurred some dystopian agencies [5], destabilized many other governments [6] and is constantly at war [7] while failing to address the needs of its population.
If you don't own your house or your whole paycheck, if you don't own your culture or what your country stands for, if you don't feel connected to your neighbor or feel like you could even connect with them, or if you're not proud of where you are, then yeah, you're a tenant. And tenants don't build.
On your first issue about lack of cohesion and Identity, I think that is by default; first, its a nascent nation comprised of immigrants. It would make sense to describe themselves by their ethnicity, than it would be to a generic 'American' moniker that doesn't really pinpoint what it is they're ascribing to themselves. Furthermore, you have multi-generational citizens like myself who will identify more with our unique culture, than to the US as a whole. My entire time in Europe I regarded myself as Californian, and not American; I'd correct people who tried to foist that term onto me as it didn't reflect my value system.
If they really wanted a History lesson on the matter I'd tell them California existed before the US did and how much Law and culture differs between CA and the rest of the US. There is a reason its many laws are aggregated as 49, pertaining to the rest, and not California. That has many caveats and drawbacks, but it exists and its worth noting.
> Moreover, it's easy to be disappointed with Americanism. Generational memory exists. People built last century expecting a better future this century, but capitalism and irresponsibility failed to make it happen. This country built roads and bridges it cannot afford to maintain [3], a health care system that bankrupts people and sells them addictions, an economy that disproportionately favors the rich, and a government that has spurred some dystopian agencies [5], destabilized many other governments [6] and is constantly at war [7] while failing to address the needs of its population.
For once I'd really like someone define what Capitalism has to do with the cronyism we've seen in the US since the gilded era. Capitalism as the mode of functional means of production has been lost since then, in its place you have robber-barons who monopolize a sector/Industry through the use of lobbyist and donations to politicians campaigns that keeps them in office way longer then was intended (Pelosi) and then offer them cushy jobs as consultants, effectively undoing the critical aspect of Capitalism: Competition.
At no point or time can I look at Jeff Bezos or Amazon and say that's Capitalism's success story, instead what you have is State sanctioned protectionism that skewed the playing field for an Amazon to take over and benefit from the model that is often berated. Labor laws seem to be entirely negligible to an entity that knows it can have a system bend to its will. The same applies to banks who not only create continual booms-busts cycles to consolidate their power, and wealth over a system but they enter into a realm in which we HAVE to believe they are 'too big to fail.' And suffer the consequences as nepotism and plutocrats emerge as the real rulers of Society.
That is exactly the antithesis of Capitalism.
Just for claity's sake: as an Anarcho-Capitalist I think Capitalism is inherently flawed at its core, as it relies on perpetual growth that can only be maintained for periods of a time, and often at great consequence to the Environment when and entity like the State exists and is the supposed vanguard. As its entirely susceptible to corruption, but its the best we have to ensure commerce continues as the viable default rather than warfare to procure goods and services.
But it's still often erroneously portrayed in a light that negates that much of the progress that got us to have critical things to modern Life and longer, healthier life expectancy are somehow the mistakes of Capitalism and not the desired outcome. And that some how we should entrust this responsibility to the very entity responsible for the corruption of a system (Governments) to benefit its own largess.
Just look at all the insider trading done by politicians on both sides as COVID was starting to shutdown the economy. That's what a political class does, it insulates itself from crimes that others would have to pay with jail or their very Life. Look at SLS with ULA, look at the entire banking sector post 2008... I can go on.
But I'd really like to see a response to this question: Define Capitalism, and how IT has led to the captured Markets and Industries you see, and are responsible for the entrenched wealth and inequality you describe.
> I'd really like someone define what Capitalism has to do with the cronyism we've seen in the US since the gilded era.
And during the gilded era. The big-time capitalists of that period were not people who made money in free market competition. They were people with inherited wealth who got beaten in free market competition by others with less inherited wealth but better entrepreneurial skills--and so they went to the government and got their competition outlawed, for example by getting monopoly rights to transcontinental railroad routes.
In other words, "capitalism" and "free market" are not synonyms, though capitalists love it when everybody else thinks they are.
> And during the gilded era. The big-time capitalists of that period were not people who made money in free market competition. They were people with inherited wealth who got beaten in free market competition by others with less inherited wealth...
Agreed, and that is in my opinion when entrenched Wealth was established to oppose the very notion of the US narrative about free enterprise. I think free commerce was possible when the US was a frontier, and even that has caveats, because Abraham Lincoln's relative was able to hi-jack California into the Union after the Bear Flag Revolution in Sonoma [1], won without any bloodshed by 30 something Frontiersmen after they removed a Mexican Governor and later made Pio Pico a politician in the New Republic to surrender without violence.
And I think it was also found in the Gold Rush thereafter. This was critical for the emerging Economy in CA that would eventually make it the 8th Largest Economy in the World.
> In other words, "capitalism" and "free market" are not synonyms, though capitalists love it when everybody else thinks they are.
I'm open to this idea, but how can you achieve this without mal-investment, and destruction of resources found in all other antithetical forms of Economic systems: I've lived and worked with Anarcho-Communists/Marxists/Socialists and I (Anarcho-Capitalist) was always the defining variable in our collective projects succeeding because they often reverted to endeavors that lost our operating Capital.
I'd get us to a certain benchmark and then we'd be able to procure services and goods to get us to the next phase only to run out of money half way because they felt it best to spend on 'feel good' gestures to appease their concerns rather than have a merit-based system where compensation came from ROI on labour and judged on an empirical individual basis.
I took pay hits, as in not paid at all and had to pay my own way for most of the entire time and I worked for free because I was so driven to make it happen, because they felt the need to take the money (they erroneously felt entitled to as funds ere held in common ownership) that I often earned on risky business ventures to offset the expenses/losses we incurred from things like printing useless propaganda and paying people for 'raising awareness' in the most useless demos imaginable.
My real mistake was to be so stubborn to my openness to collaborations with anyone who wanted achieve the same goal(s), regardless of ideology; in retrospect I'm glad I did these projects but I'm sure I had shortened my Lifespan having done these things on several occasions.
I can go on, but you get my point.
But my question remains: outside of the Capitalism, as in non State-Sanctioned Central Bank based cronyism, how do you achieve this?
Capitalism puts capital in the hands of private owners for the sole purpose of rent extraction.
I’d say decoupling capital from production in this way leads inevitably to all the things you mentioned for the simple fact that it optimizes for exactly that outcome rather than producing value.
I guess the theory goes that capital invested in profitable endeavors should produce value as a side effect. But it seems the capitalists determined that speculation and protectionism produces far more rent than actual value creation.
Edit: Not that this is an argument for central planning. Just that we still need to find a mode of production that optimizes for producing value rather than rent.
> Capitalism puts capital in the hands of private owners for the sole purpose of rent extraction.
That's one possible result of capitalism, but not the only possible one.
> I guess the theory goes that capital invested in profitable endeavors should produce value as a side effect.
No, you have it backwards. Capital invested in profitable endeavors to produce value is the primary effect. You need capital investment to increase productivity, and you need increased productivity to produce more value with the same inputs, which benefits everyone, but also benefits the owners of the capital. In other words, it's a positive sum process.
The fact that ownership of such capital can also be used to extract rents, which is not positive sum, is the side effect.
> it seems the capitalists determined that speculation and protectionism produces far more rent than actual value creation.
Speculation is not the same as rent seeking; it's a legitimate (though risky) form of investment.
Protectionism is not an inherent feature of capitalism; it's what you get when you allow the government to play favorites.
> we still need to find a mode of production that optimizes for producing value rather than rent.
We already have one: free markets, no government playing favorites. The problem is actually sticking to it.
To clarify, I meant capital invested _as private propery_ is primarily for rent extraction.
Speculation, as in buying some capital just to exclude it from others to profit from the resulting opportunity cost. Is the kind of rent seeking I was thinking of.
I agree with your notion capital as such and it’s role in production. I just think there could more interesting approaches invented to allocate it. For example to endeavors that don’t produce much rent, or even profit, such as commons based production (open source software being one example).
Markets mainly optimizes for lowering costs, not producing value. They are important tools for managing resource allocation, but thinking of them as optimize for value puts you dangerously close to interpret market prices as a measure of value.
I'm not sure why that would be the key qualification to make. A corporation that invests capital to improve productivity is investing capital as private property. I don't see why you wouldn't simply focus on whether or not the capital is invested to improve productivity.
> Speculation, as in buying some capital just to exclude it from others to profit from the resulting opportunity cost
"Speculation" is not normally defined as buying capital, but as buying goods that are expected to become scarce in the future. That is not rent seeking, it's a natural part of a free market, and serves a valid function. In a free market, by buying goods that the speculator expects to be scarce in the future, the speculator drives up their price now (by increasing demand), giving others an incentive to economize (thus conserving the good against future scarcity), and drives down their price in the future when the speculator sells them (by increasing supply), thus increasing the good's availability when needed. The profit the speculator makes is a perfectly normal profit based on the value provided.
I'm not sure why buying capital to exclude it from others would be termed "speculation", since buying capital at all, by its very nature, gives ownership of it to the buyer and excludes others. The buyer can rent it out, or can use it himself, but either way any ownership of capital, if used for productivity, earns a profit for the owner. That's why people do it. To term that "speculation" and "rent seeking" would make all productive enterprise rent-seeking, which is wrong.
> Markets mainly optimizes for lowering costs, not producing value.
Nonsense. Markets optimize for providing the things people want, as shown by their actual choices in that market. If people want more value and are willing to pay more for it, that's what the market will provide. The market for computer hardware is an excellent example: hardware with a wide range of capabilities and prices is available, because there are customers whose value to cost ratio is optimal at every price point over that entire range.
In cases where markets end up providing the lowest cost product and that's it, either the additional value in more expensive products isn't worth it to people, so they choose not to pay for it, or information about the additional value in more expensive products is not getting to the potential customers who might be willing to pay for it. The latter case can be viewed as suboptimal, certainly (transactions that would be positive sum if they happened are not happening), but it's not due to any simple flaw in markets; it's due to unavoidable facts about the real world that can't be handwaved away, and certainly can't be "fixed" by government intervention.
Let’s take land as an example of capital. When allocating land as private property, something you can buy or sell. You can just sit on it, leaving it unproductive, or you can use it to produce something, or you can rent it out to someone who has some use for it.
Now as the owner you can exercise that choice with no regard as to what would produce the most economic value. So the first option might very well be the most interesting for you even if there are more productive options. And the choice ultimately comes down to rent seeking, not value creation.
If, instead, the land could only be leased. The speculation option would not be there. The only option would be to use it for something that could pay the rent.
Now land is a bit special so perhaps not the best example. But to provide the details of how capital could be allocated as non-private property.
In a similar line of reasoning there are coop models of organizations with joint ownership of the means of production such that there isn’t a need for external capitalist ownership. And as such having different priorities, with no intention to trade shares the company might not need constant growth to achieve its goals, instead focusing on value creation first.
So the qualification was just that for a capitalist, acting only as the owner of capital, value production is secondary to return on investment.
On the topic of markets. I’d say the truth is somewhere between our two descriptions. Some of the more spectacular failures might be more tied to capitalism than markets as such. But certainly you agree there there are lots of value created outside of the markets entirely just as there lots of value destroyed within markets. Competition has its place, but there also has to be room for cooperation. I will just leave the spectacular failure that is capitalistic intellectual property approach v. commons based peer production as an example of how we clearly have some policy work to do before we can call things a success.
Not true, I think Bitcoin and specifically when used on DNM have proven to be a test-bed for Free Market Capitalism. Its no surprise the State (FBI) shuts these down and non-us affiliated exchanges, using a myriad of reasons; not least of which charging them for Anti money laundering or Know your customer infringements outside of it's Jurisdiction when the SEC and IRS cannot even come to an agreed conclusion and refuse to define Bitcoin as Money or property so it exists in a limbo state with all the drawbacks of both. They use drug prevention as a pretense but let Purdue Pharmaceutical create an opioid crisis and use the Established Medical Industry to do it and no one goes to prison.
Bitcoin is not perfect, and there are tons of scams abound, but True, Free Market Capitalism has a home: The Internet.
Bitcoin happens to be the currency of the Internet, despite not currently being anonymous or very private at its base layer. This must change, and it is as we speak, but despite those limitations it still allows for the experiments to continue.
I'm not sure how Bitcoin, being a domain of shady consolidations and market volatility, is any more glamorous a representation of capitalism than Wall St.
The fact that there are no regulators to weed out the smaller players for the benefit of the Established ones, and then central banks to bail out their cronys when they blow up their economy and offer them Golden parachutes while the rest of the masses deal with worse living conditions and a labour Market only seen (until recently) snc ethe Great Depression for starters?
The fact that front-running isn't an established Raison D'être embedded deeply into its culture and system that diminishes any value purported from its supposedly 'open markets' is another.
I can go on, but if you can't see that then you have a very superficial understanding of either systems and are require far more education than I can avail to you.
I'm not saying this to be snarky, but its clear you're simply not paying enough attention if you have to ask.
Many countries has regions and regional differences, they are still the same country and as a Californian you are still closer to any other American in any measurable parameter you can think about than to people outside your country. America didn't have lack of cohesion and identity, at those times when America could build it was overwhelmingly a north west European country with a certain set of value deriving from this. Only in the mid 20th century America started to accept non north west European immigrants in any significant numbers. Turns out diversity is not a strength, it is a disaster and ruins social cohesion, solidarity and the ability to build. It is not going to get any better.
> Many countries has regions and regional differences
Granted.
> as a Californian you are still closer to any other American in any measurable parameter you can think about than to people outside your country.
I disagree, we have very European centric Laws (the clean air act was inline with EU standards), our policy on immigration and foreign labor is very much like the EU--going so far as to defy the Federal Government as seen with its stnace of Ag labor against the Trumps administration, much of the US took massive crop losses while the CA ignored it entirely. To my surprise I have seen various signs written in both English as well Spanish, and in both Standard as well as metric systems to denote distance.
I've lived in Hawaii and to be honest, I think some of us, especially those of us from SoCal surf towns, have a greater cultural alliance with Hawaii than with the rest of the 48. Both are deeply rooted in its own respective rich History and has its own identity entirely--this is why we're always told we live in a bubble in CA, which I regret to say is true as that is not 'normal,' either. Only when I left did I realize just how perverse and toxic it could be, too. There is nothing positive about Hollywood culture, and its incredibly sordid History with Epstein and the like is just the tip of the Iceberg in my opinion.
Also California is massive, NorCal is like a different culture entirely itself--my family is originally from San Jose and Santa Cruz but I grew up all over the South and went to Europe in the summer. And the brief time I spent in the Valley, it mostly very dis-pleasurable.
Its a nice place to visit, or for business but I'd never live there again; the amount of Homeless is something I never got used to that is just normalized, and accepted. I have only ever seen something comparable in skidrow having grown up in the SoCal and its every where in the Bay Area. Everything is crowded, and expensive for no real reason other than the diaspora of People that flooded the housing Market, which in part I enjoy, but cannot justify as we have may more diversity in the South at a fraction of the cost(s). I don't know how anyone can live like that.
I live in CO now, and I can say this place is the US and despite the appearance sort of looking like Switzerland at times (where I've also lived and worked) its very American centric and still feels strange after living here all these years. When I first came in 2007 it felt even more mono-cultural and 'mountain folk-like' stripped of any cultural diversity outside of major towns. Which is interesting, but again, very different from where I was raised where you can literately visit 4-5 different Asian cultures in an hour going from North OC to the South.
> America didn't have lack of cohesion and identity, at those times when America could build it was overwhelmingly a north west European country with a certain set of value deriving from this.
You do realize that Columbus was Italian, and the Spanish conquistadors and colonizers/missionaries that followed were all Southern European, right? France followed in greater numbers than Germans or Nordics, too, hence why why Government documents are written in English/Spanish/French.
And I speak German, not well anymore if at all, but the presence of Germanic or Nordic People or its culture outside of the Great Lakes area is no where to be found, its blown out of proportion in relation to the amount of Spanish and French presence, especially in the West Coast and into Central and South America. Not only has California existed longer than the US, but so had what was called 'New Spain.' Which is why so many things are locations are written in Spanish well into the Midwest, Colorado being apt example.
> Turns out diversity is not a strength, it is a disaster and ruins social cohesion, solidarity and the ability to build. It is not going to get any better.
Honestly, I welcome the balkanization of not just the West, but the whole World. COVID has proven that large Nation-States/Empires cannot compete with City-States to not just contain a pandemic, but to provide the necessary PPE and other critical goods and the infrastructure for such a large population. In the process it has made us less safe, and on the brink of another economic Depression with obscene amounts of unemployment and unrest with Militarized Police all while we edge closer to World War with China/Russia/Iran vs US/UK/AUS/NZ/India/Hong Kong/Taiwan.
I"d argue that if there ever was a time for the Nation-State model, we have long surpassed it and there no anything to be gained from this modelin such an interconnected World and we should seek alternative to these horrible governing systems. We're going to have to re-negotiate with China, ideally without the belligerence of Xi and the CCP as well as Trump's imbecilic nature' so why not just cut to the BS posturing and saber rattling and have representatives from their respective provinces decide how to broker a deal in which Hong Kong gains Independence, as does Xianjing/Macau/Tibet/Taiwan and we can all go back to more pertinent things like advancing the Human Species with Space Exploration and reap the economic fruits of that instead of needless Warfare?
How we transition to that model is a mystery, but I pray it is without the need for more Bloody Revolution.
I think it's also related to how capitalism derives towards ultra specialisation of individuals. We help solving a very specific (often very indirect as well) need of society, extremely efficiently, and expect all our needs to be fulfilled in return. Or at least that's what we assume the system should do. But the system is never well adjusted, we just inherit it from another time. And no one makes the effort to try to improve it. We think voting is the only job we have to do in that regard, when in practice we simply contribute to perpetuating an inefficient "management", that accumulated a lot misaligned incentives over time...
The US elite have been waging total war on (domestic) collectivism for the past half century. An atomized populace buys more products and services than one that shares and cooperates freely. This is good for business but disastrous for society, as we are seeing in the 21st century.
Capitalists want the worker ants without the ant colony.
This is ridiculous, because what the author describes here is not 'collectivism' in the sense that free marketers are against. Nowhere in the post is there anything about needing to get rid of private property or even to socialize ownership of goods. What is discussed is individuals collectively taking responsibility for their own lives and those of their neighbors -- as demonstrated in the highway and obstacle example. That is not an instance of 'big government collectivism'. Quite the opposite, and one not only compatible with, but encouraged by the libertarian free market capitalists you decry.
In reference to the highly authoritarian European regimes, Toqueville states that Americans are different:
> This detachment from his own fate becomes so extreme that, if his own safety or that of his children is threatened, instead of trying to ward off the danger he folds his arms and waits for the entire nation to come to his rescue.
This sounds like something a 'far-right', liberty obsessed gun afficionado may say as he points out the importance of the second amendment and self-defence and the importance of a small government
So we're not allowed to discuss the elephant in the room i.e. the tremendous faults of unbridled late-stage capitalism and the extreme individualism it requires? I'm not sure what your point is here.
I mean it makes sense given the demo here on HN, but come on.
Elite: corporations, financiers, and their media and military arms. The "successful" capitalists.
On collectivism: Gutting organised labor wherever possible, gutting education & social programs in general, pushing identity issues to divide the population, "war on drugs", terrorism & FUD, ideological war on socialism/communism/Marxism.
I guess the anti-war and adjacent movements of the 70s is what really set them off.
So is it just me or is this guy basically advocating for anarcho-communism? Like I don't disagree that's probably the direction we need to head towards, but I never thought I'd see ancoms on HN.
It's the paradox of the firm. Centralised authority seems to be effective for small and local efforts, while not being how you'd want the whole society to be run.
> This begins to become apparent when school starts and children, even in their games, submit to the rules they have established and punish offenses following their own definitions
This is really the issue right here. Our schools neither allow children to play freely to make up their own rules. And certainly if any children decided to dole out their own punishments, that would be met with immediate hostility.
> Yeah, school nowdays tolerate bullying much less.
I'm not convinced of this. School is now largely seen as a day-care service everyone has a right to, so even when bullies get expelled, they often just get put at a different school to cause trouble for people who's parents care less.
Caveats: there's nothing wrong with writing an American article about America. And it's not to deny the many incredible achievements of the USA. The 'smell' occurs when you read (in other articles) that inflation was invented by the Fed, or that public schooling was invented for American social cohesion. That such and such US president caused a global long-term phenomenon.
This article is a bit like that. Nothing wrong with focusing on what the USA should be doing, but neglects that the same powerful economic forces operate in all kinds of places - it's hard for Australia to build, for Germany to build, for Turkey to build, for Japan to build. The author perhaps starts from the view that none of those can build great things in the first place and only the USA could be any different. And here are some nineteenth-century Tocqueville quotes to prove it. But it risks going down blind alleys.
How was the industrial revolution built in Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester? How was the Sydney Opera House built? The trans-Siberian railway? The Suez Canal? How was post-war Japan reconstructed? How were the expeditions of the Spanish and Dutch empires put together? The answers might be related to the author's ponderings about the nineteenth-century American spirit, but it's not a perfect correlation.
Building stuff is straightforward where there's not much stuff already - because it's wilderness, or everything has been bombed, or it's something new like the Internet. And stuff can be built where there's hardly any government, and also when the government has huge powers. Building is hardest and costliest when population density is high, when 'land' (or equivalent resource) is in small parcels, and property rights are strong - but those are exactly the conditions that lots of people love to live in.
If societies can figure out how to build new infrastructure in cities, they can also figure out how to build super-projects. Both of those are hard problems. I agree with the article author that it requires co-operation, self-organisation, recognition of common interests and allocation of a decisive authority. But there's no answer yet to the problem of the legitimacy of that authority in places where there are many competing and dissenting interests.