>The “why now?” question seems like it could be related to a wealthier society having more money and luxury to spend towards activism, political engagement, etc.
This was essentially my first thought, too. As society gets richer, we can afford to be more careful with decision-making and execution--but we pay the price of getting less done.
I think we observe the same phenomena with the lifecycle of businesses: a startup can "move fast and break things", but once it grows into a large company, it becomes "do what you can while moving carefully".
Are there any comparatively wealthy countries to the US that aren't tiny? The GDP per capita of the US is almost 20000 dollars more than Germany for example.
According to indexmundi here https://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=67 , the US GDP PPP is 59,800 vs Germany's 50,800. The US having 17.7% higher GDP per capita PPP is pretty significant.
Another thing to consider is the states that are closest to Germany. There's a not very nice joke in international political economy "That God for Alabama." The... humor, for lack of a better word, is that Germany, the richest EU state, would be poorer per capita than every individual US states, except for Alabama. Sometimes Germany would be merely in the bottom 10, depending on how exactly you measure it, but it doesn't bode well.
As to size, Germany covers some 137,988 square miles. The USA, some 3,797,000 square miles, or just under 3 million if you exclude Alaska and Hawaii. So, yes, sorry, Germany is tiny by comparison.
It is a funny joke, but it should really be "Thank God for Florida, and also Arizona, Montana, Maine, Kentucky, South Carolina, Alabama, Idaho, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Mississippi". Germany would be a bottom-quartile US state, but barely so, not fighting it out with Alabama and/or Mississippi for last place.
I want to jump in here to make the point that some people assume that GDP differences must mean America is better run than Germany (not that you have said this to be clear). However, this isn't necessarily true- America has the advantage of economies of scale and several other factors.
Do they consider the high cost of infrastructure in PPP adjustments?
Anyway not sure that this is an adjustment that's obviously relevant given that we asking "why is infrastructure expensive?" not "what is the mean ability for people to buy goods and services?"
It's a bit relevant if we are considering the wealth of a country vis a vie its ability to make things.
You are right, though, that infrastructure is awkward. It seems to become more expensive and difficult to produce the wealthier a country is. Usually for PPP you are trying to see what the money spent by people actually buys, instead of just the exchange rate (if you look at housing differences this becomes important) but as you say, people don't really buy infrastructure, but get taxed and hope it happens. Plus how much infrastructure gets used and how much value people get out of it is really tough too, since it isn't priced in the normal way. Apropos to the rail discussion above, Phoenix spends a ton on light rail, but has hardly any more transit ridership than it did with just buses a decade or so ago. The rail is super expensive by comparison, and requires a lot more subsidy to have running. So... are Phoenicians getting more or less infrastructure for their money? In terms of physical stuff, more maybe. In terms of use of physical stuff per dollar, a lot less it would seem.
We are beginning to bounce into the semipermeable membrane of rationalizing social processes, particularly the measuring bit.
The continental US is larger than the European Union and the distance from LA TO NYC is ~900 miles more than the distance from Paris to Moscow as the crow flies. The EU also has over 100 million extra people contributing to overall GDP.
Perhaps this is a naive assessment, but for the example of railroads, It seems likely a US Railroad would need to be much longer, and thus require more materials, more land, and more labor to build compared to a European one of comparable practical value and with the cost spread over fewer tax payers.
Also, it's my understanding that Europe is well-populated pretty much all over, while the US has it's population concentrated on the coasts with the reagion between the Appalachians and Rockies mostly empty by comparison... As such, if you wanted to build a pan-European Railroad from scratch, most of the member states could probably afford to build their own sections while a theoretical pan-American Railroad would probably need Federal backing to build sections passing through the most sparsely populated states.
Similar can be said of various other things: Roads, high-speed internet, long distance power transmission... If you need infrastructure to transport something between important locations, in many cases, that infrastructure needs to cover much more ground in theUS than the EU, and in some cases, that infrastructure has to pass through areas where there aren't enough locals to make building it a local priority.
Germany might be a Giant by European standards, but it's beaten in land mas by 4 US states, 3 of which are in the continental US... and Texas beats even France and Ukraine, so I think calling Germany tiny compared to the US is a reasonable assessment.
Admittedly, the above really only applies to things that have to span whole continents to do their job properly and doesn't explain things such as one city of a million people lacking enough hospitals when a different city of a million people having room to spare hospital beds for overflow from neighboring towns.
That's all true, but most railroads, or proposed new tracks or lines (or whatever they're called) are in the most densely populated areas, e.g. coastal California or the The Sprawl (basically Baltimore to Boston). And NYC's costs are an order of magnitude higher than (roughly) comparable metro areas in other developed countries (e.g. Japan).
Certainly _some_ of that difference can be attributed to, e.g. a 20% higher PPP, but not an order of magnitude.
GDP ain't everything. Take a walk through Stuttgart or Osaka, and then take a stroll through San Francisco or Chicago. When you're done, ask yourself which places felt more wealthy.
Can't do that, there's a pandemic, I'll have to just imagine doing this in a way that confirms my priors... :P
Anyway I think my point stands that there aren't really peer countries to the US on this type of measurement, which could mean that it is something similar to what is measured by GDP per capita is causing the high costs.
GDP is well correlated to cost of living, which is what determines things like the prices of things, h=which is what this question was about.
I'm happy to say that places with dirt-poor cost of living but great infrastructure culture/etc. can 'feel more wealthy' than places with high cost of living and none of that. But in terms of 'why do things cost more here,' the GDP is relevant.
Alon Levy is the person to read on that. He doesn't have anything like a full explanation, but he gives many partial explanations. He is also particularly interested in the question of why construction costs and efficiency don't live up to our stereotypes - e.g., Spain and Korea are the most efficient places to build things, with Scandinavia just behind; Germany, Japan, Italy, and the Netherlands are middling; Singapore and Hong Kong are quite bad; UK and US are just off the charts.
Here's one post about this, but you should explore much of the rest of his blog if you want to learn more:
Every possible veto point adds delays and costs to the process. If you need to build a railroad across 100 miles, and every 10 miles there's a different little government jurisdiction that can vote to veto, you have to hassle with negotiating with ALL of them. In addition, there are labor disputes and unions that can veto your construction unless you pay them more money, there are environmental agencies that can veto unless you do what they want, and so on. In addition, every material input has some sort of vetocracy making its own prices higher (like in the union labor example).
Yup, and your railroad is useless unless you have a continuous pair of rails running from point A to point B. Typically there is only one, maybe two routes you can use because railroads need tracks that are practically level. 1% incline is fairly steep by railroad standards. Horseshoe Curve west of Altoona PA isn't even 2% and trains sometimes struggle to get up it even with two engines in the front and two pushing from the back.
Oh, you want to build a railroad? First, you'll need an archeological dig done, to ensure that you're not going to disturb any historical sites. Second, you'll need an environmental study done, to ensure that you aren't harming any bugs or bunnies. Third, you'll need a building permit, because everything needs to be vetoes unless it has a building permit. Fourth, you'll need to own or acquire an easement over all the property you wish to use. Back in the good old days, that used to be easy, because people wanted a railroad on their property because that meant prosperity. You can tell -- all the fancy Victorian homes in the US can be found only in towns that had a railroad. Fifth, you'll need a permit from whomever controls the waterways nearby, because you can't allow to make ANY changes without one, and chances are that all the changes you want to make, you can't.
Basically, there is stop energy everywhere you turn.
Looks like shakedowns adding up to moral panics to me. Say I'm a crooked politician shaking down a business for bribes, I have media badmouth the business, things get out of hand and there are moral panics against the evils of building steel, cars, dams, small planes, nuclear power plants, highways, railroads, software, so forth. Next guys I shake down know I can break them easily. What's stopping me?
1962 D-JFK breaks US Steel to the Clintons bribed to nick Microsoft good nothing stopped me.
But why are there moral panics about things that, 60-80 years ago, were the symbols of progress and a better future? It can't *just* be a hangover from days of Robert Moses, can it?
Once you have a physical capital investment you have a magnet for shakedowns. Railroads got shook down from the moment they were built. It's one reason we switched to trucking from railroads- it's harder to shake down a trucking company that just needs a parking lot and access to a highway, than to shake down a railroad with tracks just sitting there.
I'm thinking the "Why now?" may have something to do with the fragmentation of media. People with power want to keep power. When bad ideas come by, they are expected to stop them or risk losing power. This is true even when they have no stake in stopping bad ideas.
When there were only a few TV stations and newspapers that mattered, it was pretty simple. If none of these respectable outlets were against a new idea, it was safe to let it pass. Even if it was bad in retrospect, they could defend themselves by pointing out that no one knew at the time.
Now there is so much media that someone is attacking every idea. If they let something pass, an opponent can find some media showing that a responsible, well informed, person would have KNOWN it was bad.
It's less safe for people with veto power to do nothing when they don't care about an issue. At the very least they should raise some objection to protect themselves later.
And the bar for a bad outcome has been lowered. Even a net positive policy might produce one emotional story of an innocent being negatively affected which is enough ammunition for a negative campaign.
EVERY net positive policy will produce negative stories. Policy is hard and complicated. Over a large enough scale, there will be something that goes wrong. If the policy is designed to restrict behavior it will be interpreted to restrict some good behavior as well. If it is to enable behavior it will be interpreted to allow some bad behavior as well. If the policy is to force coordination where society and market have failed, this force will cause problems as well.
I think you might also put it slightly differently - in a very poor society, there might be many ways to improve things and only a few they could get worse, while in a richer society, there are more ways that changes could make things go wrong. Thus, wealthy societies might *rationally* be more risk-averse.
(Compare: in a complex organism, there are far more ways for a mutation to be harmful than in a simple organism. Thus, mammal DNA tends to have many different error correcting mechanisms, and thus far fewer mutations than viral DNA or RNA.)
In a nutshell, vetocracy derives from the fear of majority rule. People tend to think that relying on majority rule will mean a constant oppression of a specific minority by a specific majority. But people are different in numerous dimensions, there are no fixed majorities. This gives rise to a kind of consensual government that both protects all sorts of minorities - because everyone is a minority in some dimension - but also is capable to move ahead decisively when it really benefits the common good. Read Anthony Mcgann.
Robert Moses didn't really seem like that much of a representative of majority rule. Bureaucrats can have a certain amount of autonomy & discretion, which only got increased when we junked the spoils system & professionalized the civil service.
My argument is not bureaucracy vs elected representatives. It is majority vs vetoes and supermajorities. Majority rule is perfectly capable of establishing professionalized civil services. The UK, for example, never had supermajority requirements until recently (and even now it is debatable how binding the requirement is). Still, they always have had some of the leading civil services.
I don't think you understand the point. We had Robert Moses, who was an example of autonomous bureaucracy rather than "majority rule". A backlash to him established more veto points, but that was NOT due to fears of "majority rule" but instead an unelected bureaucrat riding roughshod over the people affected by his decisions. I never said anything about it being impossible to establish a professionalized civil service in a system that doesn't require supermajorities. I am saying that bureaucracies can face veto points just as legislatures can. And as governing gets more complex and legislatures rely more on bureaucracies to decide what to do, the veto points faced by bureaucracies will get more important.
Part of this is also a feedback loop. When you have existing powerful minorities who control systems and like them the way they are, then they will add more veto points to the system to protect against future groups being able to change them.
I agree it's part of it. But it is also a lack of trust that a system reliant upon majority rule will protect their interests enough. So several minorities, even the relatively less powerful, may cling to their veto points and specific powers because they fear that's all they can get.
I think he just read too much into the ‘paradise’ part, as in there is no reason for government to necessarily or relevantly curtail human freedom, especially if you are thinking of ‘positive’ freedoms. Hence the ‘libertarian propaganda’ part.
No, it is the trope "government can't do anything" which aims to undermine the concept of government in a democracy. The goal of a privileged libertarian political minority is to maintain their allowed externalities to the detriment of the general population.
Government has very large principal-agent problems. When working for someone else, the agents do a pretty poor job.
But when they do things for themselves, mainly in the pursuit of easiness, social status or out and out profit, or power, the government is very effective because the agents accrue those benefits and are thus incentivized to maximize them.
Here are some more references. When I was born, the world populations was approximately 1.5 Billion individuals and in 2020 ~8 Billion individuals. The UN forecasts ~10 Billion individuals in 2050. According to the CATO Institute: "Libertarians see the individual as the basic unit of social analysis." https://www.cato.org/commentary/key-concepts-libertarianism
Robert, speaking as a non-libertarian, I think you need to make your arguments a little more engaging than their current "non-sequitur followed by link to book" form.
If I'm judging whether my time would be well spent reading any of the texts you link to, the only thing I really have to go on is my impressions of the person recommending them...
😃 Yes, I should have written 2.5Billion. The point is the basic unit of community social analysis is family/clan/tribe/ and various grouping names or identities as the numbers scale from there.
... that review makes it sound like a paranoid conspiracy theory which believes there's one single evil group that's responsible for everything bad. Just another version of "the Jews are behind everything".
As the review states: “ Now, this is one of those situations where the book is better than the review, so you should read it, but let me give you a sense of the many dimensions” Not sure how you got to your conclusion, but L'Chaim...
When I say it's just another version of "the Jews are behind everything", I don't mean that it blames the Jews. I mean it's just another generation of the same old purity-based conception of community: If we could just get rid of all the pagans / the Christians / the pagans again / the Jews / the Arians / the merchants / the witches / the nobility / the middle class / representational art / the kulaks / the Jews again / the middle class again / the counter-revolutionaries / the racists, then everything would be perfect.
Societies are complex; improving them is complex; everybody makes mistakes; everybody has their share of blame. The idea that all of our biggest problems can be blamed on one group of people is always wrong; is always propaganda (usually in service of the ruling power); and always leads to oppression, and usually bloodshed.
I need to add some provisos to that. There are cases where some group is responsible for the worst of a society's problems, or at least most of some other group's problems.
- In 10th-century Europe, the Vikings really were responsible for a lot of Europe's problems.
- In 13th-century and 17th-century Europe, the Catholic Church really was responsible for a large proportion of Europe's problems.
- In the US south during slavery, slave owners and Southern culture were, in fact, to blame for all of the biggest problems of blacks in America.
- There are families of metaphysical beliefs which I think, taken together, are responsible for most of our problems today. But these families aren't recognized as groups.
The fundamental problem though is human evolutionary behavior as understood from studying the great apes such described by Barbara King "Roots of Human Behavior" or Jared Diamond's "The World before yesterday among others.
Although you can clearly see the problem, unfortunately humanity has generations to go before the tribal groups you enumerate don't dominate human reaction to diversity or assigning blame to others.
Of course since the world may soon reach peak Phosphorous, population and societal issues will change dramatically.
Yeah, one of the things I noted in the comments of the linked post is that William Stuntz' book (which Robin is discussing) emphasizes the enormous amount of discretion given to prosecutors. Robin replied to me that he was lumping police & prosecutors together, and I was doing the same thing without thinking about it here.
When I was young and working at Bell Laboratories all staff were given a tour of a central telephone office. In the basement were the chases piled high with miles of disconnected circuit wires. The linemen were paid for installing circuits but not for removing the old wires no longer being used. Similarly with regulation, very little investment or effort goes into removing those that are no longer relevant or useful. Apparently it is cheaper just to let them be ignored.
That would be a monumental waste of time and you know it. Anyone can register to edit a Wikipedia, only an elite few can have their edits on any remotely controversial article last more than a day, and joining that elite requires an enormous commitment of time and social capital. As always, if you're going to go to Wikipedia for something like this, you read the talk page. Or, in this case, the forty-two archived talk pages full of people saying essentially "that article is a pile of nonsense and I registered to edit it so that it wouldn't be a pile of nonsense, but you all keep turning it back into a pile of nonsense".
Yes, that was the joke. Wikipedia has armies of trolls and vigilantes protecting whatever labels, falsehoods or disinformation a Wikipedia article has established. Best to go to a real encyclopedia.
Is the answer to this not "entitlement spending"? There are also veto points in repealing or reducing things. Social Security and Medicare are expensive, and are getting more expensive as the population ages. Even with nothing new, the Government is going to keep getting bigger until you can overcome the veto points involved in changing this. And that is hard.
This seems like one of those times where it's worth insisting on a non-US centric perspective. Plenty of countries don't have anything like the same number of veto points the US has, and do absolutely fine.
Most high GDP nations that I have at least a passing familiarity with seem to have fewer veto points than the US.
Suppose you want to make a bill law in the UK: If you're the government you introduce the bill. The bill is debated and arguments are made. It then almost certainly passes (it's a scandal if a government bill doesn't pass). The house of lords can delay it a bit or make certain kinds of symbolic protests but that's it. You can then be held accountable for it next election.
Suppose you want to make a bill law in America: First you've got to get it through committees- a much harder process than in the Uk. Then you've got to get it through the house. Then you've got to get it through the senate- you either need a non-filibuster, or a 3/5ths majority. Then you need the president not to veto it. Then you need the supreme court not to strike it down.
> . I don't think it is fair to say that we built our way out of the coronavirus problem.
I don't think anyone claimed that the UK was an amazing example of building your way out of the coronavirus problem.
Getting rid of veto points and making it more possible for government to govern and make changes, doesn't guarantee things will go well. I imagine things will go poorly and better much quicker, hopefully evening out to a level of progress that is aligned with the populations viewpoints. Things will go better in the medium to long term. By allowing the Governing party to enact its goals, the people will be able to judge them on what they did or did not accomplish, during the next election cycle. The stronger connection between the governing party and laws getting enacted, the stronger and healthier the feedback loop will be of democracy.
Of course there's lots of problems that interfere, such as disinformation, and polarization in general. An idea Ezra often states is that the current American system which is weighed towards inaction, causes the focus to shifted much more to social issues, such as cancel culture, using peoples preferred pronouns, gay marriage, etc. Politicians try to rile up their bases against the opponent with controversial social issues, instead of doing stuff that they think can make the US better and then being judged on that.
Do you feel that the UK is worse off now, because it does not have an American style 3/5 Veto point in the house of lords? Would it be better or worse in that world?
>Many of the other high Gdp countries will be under the super structure of the eu which is famously veto prone.
I'm not an expert in how the EU works or anything, so i'm genuinly curious on whether the EU is famously veto prone, or not.
From some basic research, it looks like the EU has taken large steps in recent decades (Treaty of Lisbon ) away from unanimity (a Veto system) towards something called Qualified Majority Voting.
There are still items that require unanimity, such as adding a new country to the EU but it seems like that list of topics that can be vetoed has shrunk.
The EU is complicated. The first thing to keep in mind is it's not a country, it's a weird hybrid between a federal system and an international organization with no contemporary equivalent. The countries within the EU are mostly parliamentary democracies with fewer nominal veto points than the US - unicameral legislatures means no House/Senate deadlocks, and Parliament-appointed governments mean legislative/executive deadlocks are rarer.
As for whether the EU is veto-prone? In a nominal sense, oh gods yes. Compared to the EU on paper, the US is a utopia of majority rule. The most majoritarian system in the EU is the normal legislative procedure, requiring a proposal by the Comission (executive), a majority in Parliament (legislative, directly elected) and a "qualified majority" in the Council of member state governments (legislative), that being (roughly) a simple majority counted by number of countries and a two-thirds majority counted by population. And that's for, essentially, internal regulatory stuff, within the scope of the competences. ("Enumerated powers" in US-speak.) Anything relating to foreign policy requires governmental unanimity. Any money going into the EU, unanimity. Any form of taxation at the EU level, unanimity at the governmental level as well as all member state legislatures.
As for how it works in practice - under present circumstances it seems like US couldn't function at all at the federal level if these were the sorts of procedures it has to follow, even if it had the same basic powers as it does now (which are much greater than those of the EU), so something must be working better. Crucially, politics in Europe aren't European-ized the way US politics are nationalized, not by far. Politics at the European level are still dominated, on balance, by splits along member states, rather than party lines. National parties do form pan-European alliances for the EU Parliament but hardly anyone could tell you by heart what the groupings are, exactly.
I'm too tired to do a comprehensive analysis or come to a real conclusion. For further comparison, I might mention a few significant items of EU legislation.
The Pandemic Recovery Package - a herculean effort started by Germany dropping its historical red line of shared debt, which then took six months to sort about because vetos from Hungrary and Poland over nominally unrelated, but simultaneous, legislation over stronger human rights conditionality on the EU budget, generally seen as a sort of workaround of Article 7. (The main tool against human rights violations by EU members, which requires - you guessed it - unanimity.) Ultimately resolved Parliament really digging its heels in, the other member states coming up with a credible threat of implementing the Package on a sort of voluntary basis between themselves without Hungrary or Poland, and some concessions, more or less significant ones depending on who you ask.
Sanctions on Belarus and Turkey - An episode in EU foreign relations were everyone wanted to sanction Belarus over the fraudulent elections, but Cyprus wouldn't budge unless it also got sanctions on Turkey. This want on for weeks (a month or two, even?) until Cyprus finally relented in exchange for symbolic concessions. It was all very embarrassing, but I'm not sure if the culprit is Cyprus' refusal to back down for so long, or the other countries' refusal to sanction Turkey, especially given the various escalations since.
Regulation on disclosing corporate taxes - Was introduced at the EU level a few years ago. First there was a blocking minority in the Council, but nobody knew which countries since they don't have to tell anyone. Since this secrecy is a procedural question it could be changed by a simple majority of countries, but the pro-regulation majority refused. Then eventually the voting lists leaked, a couple of national parliaments forced their governments to change their votes to yes, and now Germany is the lone holdout. Germany held the rotating Council presidency for all of last fall, so they simply refused to schedule a vote on it until finally Portugal took over for the spring of 2021. Now it looks on track to pass, but overriding Germany like this is notable for being really really rare.
Brexit itself is a pretty good example of a government being able to push through sweeping change despite only having a small majority. There's no way that happens in the US.
My (very limited) impression is that the government was mostly trying to _stop_ Brexit – not push it through. If anything, Brexit was something popular enough with voters that _they_ pushed it through over the strenuous objections of 'the government'.
I admit that the only British pundits I follow are pretty hard left, but, my impression of modern-day Britain is that it has a fair number of 'atrocities and abuses', at least at the level of poor and minority groups being hurt by government action.
Which would be one thing if those problems were trade-offs for really great growth and prosperity, or something. But if I'm googling correctly, mean annual gdp growth has been about 30% higher in the US than the UK over the last half century, despite our vetocracy problems.
I'd be cautious with UK pundits discussing atrocities: a lot(across the political spectrum) tend to write influenced by what they see as happening in the US. So, to take one example you may have seen, the number of black people shot by the police in the UK is substantially less than one per year. The supporters of Black Life Matters tend to give a different story.
To show balance, it's worth noting how histrionic about culture war themes some conservative commentators on the UK get as well. It's the same issue: express your tribal allegiance through blindly importing the problems of a more prestigious (I assume) political system and therefore present minor concerns as major ones.
Also worth mentioning that the powers of the UK parliament are much greater than those of the US Congress, relatively speaking. Under the US constitution, Congress is limited to its enumerated powers, limited by various constitutionally-encoded rights protections, and the process for amending the constitution is currently politically impossible. Without a codified constitution, under the principle of Parliamentary Sovereignty, the UK Parliament can do basically whatever it wants to, whenever it wants to. No particular rule is protected, except by convention, and courts can't strike down Acts of Parliament because there's no higher authority to appeal to. Even the rules it has historically imposed on itself - like the two-thirds majority for a new election under the Fixed Terms act of 2011 - are in effect like the US Senate filibuster, able to be dispensed with by a simple majority at any time if the simple majority really want to, as was indeed done to force the 2019 special elections.
In the particular case of the pandemic I suppose this hasn't been hugely significant. Congress hasn't been overly encumbered by constitutional limits, and high-profile court cases lost by the government - see New York, for example - were against executive action, and even the UK courts can strike down the actions of the executive.
I'd mostly comment that making a bill law in most parliamentary systems is a tad more complicated, and a tad less complicated than presented here. It's more complicated insofar as there still ar committees and discussion before a bill usually makes it to the floor of the house of commons (aside from private member bills which usually come direct from a singular parliamentarian). And sometimes those committees can be opaque and slow as hell. And then it usually has to go through two or three reading passes before it's finally voted on and formally passed/rejected. Westminster systems still retain a "president" veto slot, though that's the Governor General and that veto is pretty damned rare (the position is primarily ceremonial now, and using that veto is a pretty much guaranteed career ender). And much to most people's surprise, Westminster systems also have a supreme court that can (and does) completely eviscerate laws if they don't pass muster.
But on the flip side, government power is usually rather solidly set on one balance IE who has majority in the house of commons. Which means that the most visible part of passing laws IE committee and voting is managed by whoever holds the majority (either outright or as part of coalition). Which means that on the face of it, most things that get to the floor of the house are either supported by the opposition parties (and are guaranteed to lose but are intended to make a statement), or will pass because one part holds majority. Which means that, generally speaking, bills DO move faster and become law faster.
I agree! In my experience, Germany has its own form of NIMBYism but it rarely succeeds as long as the political mainstream supports the plan (but else, it does succeed, see the wind power plant placing problems at the 'Energiewende', or the 'Mietpreisbremse' in Berlin). It does, however, have a huge amount of regulation causing it to have twice the number of lawyers as its neighbors [1]. For example, 'BER' airport, 'Elbphilharmonie' and 'Stuttgart 21' were delayed as a result of this (see also my top-level comment).
The common underlying cause to polarization and vetocracy here is that we're becoming a lower-trust society, I think. That clearly creates polarization (because siege mentality), and also creates vetocracy (the less you trust the generic group of other people, the higher the odds that a random project of theirs will actually be bad for you, and the more veto power you want over it).
And the second issue you raise at the end - that eliminating vetocracy may actually enable bad things - is also a consequence here, because lower-trust societies are generally not just less trusting, but also less trustworthy, so to a large degree the reduced level of trust is actually rational. The ideal solution would be to increase trust, but that's a Hard Problem.
The trust problem, I think, is rooted in cyclical racism and xenophobia, which we can never seem to permanently put behind us. Enlightenment reasoning showed us the value of mutual aid, to which we still pay a lot of lip service. But when the conditions are ripe, humans have a tendency to gamble on their own inner resources instead of throwing their lot in with the mixed community (because they don't trust that the community, with its diversity of needs, will leave them better off than going it alone).
This survival-of the-fittest mentality boils to the surface when enough people tune into fear-based rhetoric that says the system is horribly unfair to them. (E.g., Red State residents tend to believe they're getting ripped off by the Feds, whereas in reality they routinely benefit quite a bit more from the communal Federal pool than the Blue States who subsidize them.)
The racism/xenophobia often plays out with a civilized veneer: "I would love, love, love to be able to help those in need -- if only it could be done without waste, fraud, and abuse!"
By prioritizing vague notions of economic prudence above real people's needs they are revealing a lack of empathy when it comes to Others. After the West Virginia GOP governor Jim Justice recently pleaded for people to pass a Big Covid relief package, saying, "We need to go big now, and if we waste some money, well, we waste some money," fellow Republicans immediately pushed back with the kneejerk response of, no, we need to figure out how to do it without wasting money!
This would be like Ted Cruz at a house fire, telling the fire crew to stop working until they figured out how to spray without wasting so much water.
Our governments (both federal and local) comprise a huge, huge institution. It's perfectly reasonable to work as hard as possible to minimize waste, fraud, and abuse, but it's an intellectual and moral cop-out to use waste, fraud, and abuse as an excuse for blocking all spending for communal benefit (which these days has even become a kneejerk blocking of basic infrastructure spending). Just look at how willing Republicans are to spend, spend, spend when it's NOT spending for the benefit of those Others who they have deemed too week or lazy to keep up.
>The trust problem, I think, is rooted in cyclical racism and xenophobia, which we can never seem to permanently put behind us.
Your people blame racism and xenophobia, I blame the fact that every time my people say "hey, I see what you're trying to do there, but I don't think that'll work the way you intend it to" you accuse them of racism and xenophobia.
But this exact kind of "no u" infighting is the problem. We've managed to get ourselves in a defect-defect equilibrium, where instead of righties and lefties debating issues, one side proposes something, the other attacks it, and we just stand around calling each other authoritarian communists and neo-nazis and never actually help anyone.
I realize the following will not satisfy your objections in the least.
But we are in a Hannah Arendt Banality of Evil period -- when some of us are recognizing the moral failure of others who are suffering from a lack of imagination (as in shrugging off the former president's profoundly malignant anti-democratic actions and words with a snicker -- "That's just Trump being Trump"). No. That's just Trump being evil, as his supporters (and excusers) fail to see that this is precisely how oppression emerges. Hitler, too, was just being silly old Hitler until he was given the power to take his malignancy to its logical conclusion.
My point it that I reject the false equivalencies that abound among today's GOP (I won't indict "conservatives writ large, because I believe they are helpful to a balanced, healthy democracy.) Simply put, Democrats and liberals are not the same species as today's Republicans that refuse to even being to try to stamp out the evil represented by Trumpism.
Sometimes in history we have no choice but to call out the malignant ignorance of "the other side." "Righties and Lefties" are not currently all fighting for the same team (democracy). The reason? Today's Righties have developed a militant deficiency of empathy -- and it's too serious to be glossed over with, "We ALL need to stop blaming each other." No. Not until the Right begins to honestly accept responsibility for trying to drown our entire democracy in a bathtub, ignoring the suffering and oppression of Others with the tired defense that everyone else is proposing bad ideas. Let's not forget, for example, how many times they tried to kill healthcare reform with absolutely NO alternatives offered.
On a very mundane level, they simply cannot be bothered to care.
You're conflating a whole bunch of different concerns here. Trump was bad, sure, but that says nothing about whether welfare anti-fraud regulations are racist.
Given the fact that there was no evidence of significant welfare fraud in the first place, that faked-up stories of (black) "welfare queens" who didn't exist were used to sell the "anti-fraud" regulations, and that the "anti-fraud" regulations actually cost more than the estimated sum total of all welfare fraud, yes, the welfare anti-fraud regulations implemented by Reagan and G W Bush were racist.
The Republican party was proposing alternatives to the ACA throughout the entire Obama administration, the media just didn't tell you about them.
If you genuinely believe Trump was a Hitler wannabe, there's nothing I can say that will convince you otherwise. But don't you think it's a little bit odd that every time you make that accusation, the response is never "you're damn right he is, that's exactly what we want," the response is "no he isn't, you've lost your damn mind?" The guy was a master of making statements that sound utterly mundane if you read them charitably and horrific if you read the worst possible interpretation in to them, thereby making it impossible for his supporters and opponents to communicate.
People voted for him because he promised to solve their problems, just like people vote for left-wing politicians because they promise to solve their problems. _You_ need to stop listening to corporations whose business model relies on keeping you terrified and hateful of your neighbors.
Interesting backstory on the rise of Trump (in the New Yorker a few years back if memory serves): Bannon and Luntz kept discovering a very interesting phenomenon rising quietly in the polls over several years, and it really had little to do with policy positions and everything to do with people yearning for a "strongman" (no, not a strong man, but a Putin type authoritarian). And this polling is what convinced Bannon and his crowd that someone like Trump might actually be viable for the first time in so and so many years.
So that -- combined with what I've been seeing with my own eyes -- makes me disagree with your premise that people didn't actually want the worst of what Trump had/has to offer. Maybe some tell themselves they don't, but his clearly coded speech, backed up by his non-coded speech, and his non-coded actions just can't be ignored by people of honesty and good will.
Trump himself is not the issue. He's just a symptom of a critical mass of people who decided they were fed up enough with our democracy (too incrementalistic / too socialistic / too whatever) that it was time to take shortcuts, as in the hysterical Flight 93 doctrine popular among conservative intellectuals who wanted to justify their support for Trump.
You don't have to "believe" in anti-democratic trends, racism, and xenophobia in order to excuse, enable, and ally with those who do. And any informed person who pretends this isn't what's been going on is simply gaslighting the rest of us.
And how many gleeful/hopeful comments have I seen yearning over Biden as the liberal/left strongman? I don't think he's anywhere approaching to anything like that, he's a career politician and probably a mushy centrist (which is now a term of opprobium).
But the amount of people having fever-dreams over what he's going to do when in office, and recounting the first days executive orders, and all the magic pixie-dust that will be sprinkled to solve all the problems now you have a "real human as president for the first time in four years" (direct quote from someone I know online) - yeah, populist yearning is not a one-side element.
You know what? You lost my sympathy with a very simple stroke - capital-O "Others". I've read "The Stranger" and "The Outsider", we're all up on our theory.
"Other/Others" don't exist. Talking about "others" means something. Trying to put people into special categories so they can then be put into theoretical boxes and have labels of merit attached is wearisome and I'm fed-up with it. Say that "Republicans don't care about anyone but themselves" if that's your honest view of the matter but for the love of God don't start talking about "Others". It's the left-equivalent of HBD not as "human biodiversity means that people are different (but they're still all humans with the rights of humans)" but "HBD is a euphemism for scientific racism". Well, "Others" is a euphemism for sociological racism, and it's not any the better for that. The only difference between "HBD" and "Others" is in the contents of what box are being patted on the head as Superior.
Honestly, I have no interest in courting your sympathy. My purpose is purely to indict.
Any half-informed person who still identifies with today's GOP has relinquished any claim to seriousness when it comes to participating in honest, civil discourse. I say this without hyperbole. The damage to culture, democracy, diversity, science, and reason-based interchange of ideas has simply been too extraordinary to excuse.
I, for one, will not be gaslighted by those who still insist on clinging to the pretense that their collective behavior has been within the bounds of constructive participation in modern collective society. As long as they refuse to admit the damage and re-commit to honest engagement they can have no role in rebuilding, as they are demonstrably still committed to "tearing it all down" -- which may be a legitimate philosophical (anarchic) stance, but it is antithetical to the American project, whose burden of upkeep we all share as citizens.
They need to be relegated back to the shadows where bigots and nihilists had been dwelling before Trump et al encouraged them to come out and party. Those who continue to think "socialism" or whatever is giving them permission to cynically throw out the rules have zero to offer at the present time. When they wake up (hello Nicole Wallace) they will be embraced, and their honest ideas will be heard.
I get it, you are Emile Zola and this is your "J'Accuse!" Well, Zola was right in the Dreyfuss case.
But it's not my sympathy you need to court, it's my conviction. And this discourse around "the Other" and "Othering" is its own sickly, saccharine form of Orientalisation and The Noble Savage from the liberal-to-progressive side.
Stop telling me that X is *so* different from me that I couldn't possibly understand their lived experience. Tell me that X is being treated like shit and I'll want to help do something to fix that. Tell me that X is an exotic zoo specimen and why should I care, I have my own problems?
I also like the fashion in which you are doing your own form of Othering - those dreadful awful people who are bigots and anti-democracy who should be relegated to the shadows from whence they skulked.
"Any half-informed person who still identifies with today's GOP has relinquished any claim to seriousness when it comes to participating in honest, civil discourse. I say this without hyperbole."
You do realise that to engage in discourse requires giving up some control of what can be discussed? Discourse by your rules only is not possible.
I don't understand what you are seeking to do on this site, but it seems you are unwilling to allow the basic humanist courtesy of allowing your opponent an opinion. I doubt you are going to do more than reinforce the view that there is a certain type of progressive thinker who has the arrogance to believe their views are correct and everyone else is at least wrong and perhaps evil. If your aim is to be the secular version of that irritating born-again Christian stereotype, then feel free. It seems a waste of your thoughts to me though, as everyone has something interesting to say.
Those are some reasons why your side doesn't trust the other side. Can you think of any valid (or close to valid) reasons the other side doesn't trust your side?
I think some of the stereotypical character differences between conservative and liberals are rooted at least vaguely in actuality. (E.g., conservatives tend to be more defense oriented, whereas liberals tend toward expansiveness.) In my ideal village we'd have a balance of such characters. Some people naturally gravitate toward security and conservation while others toward exploration and new ideas about humanity and society. Authoritarianism seeks to destroy that balance.
So I can certainly empathize with, say, the fears of others who believe liberals will undermine their security or stability in some manner. The current problem is rooted in the Republican realization that they could just say NO to every damn thing -- and the people at large would place the blame, not on them particularly, but generally on government, which of course reinforces the conservative position of minimizing all government action anyway. The demagogues -- the anti-democratic Steve Bannons -- have crept in meanwhile to weaponize politics to their individual, cynical advantage. Republicans willing to turn a blind eye to the rampant racism and sadism are complicit. What's most remarkable about this period is how few have been willing to put themselves at risk by denouncing this trend.
So, while I can empathize on a personal level with a conservative's fears, we now find ourselves in a willfully broken system that cannot begin to repair itself until the Right starts to renounce its reliance on lies, demonization of almost all action, and the rejection of reason, science, and facts -- which have been the world's common currency since the beginning of the Enlightenment, but which today's conservatives eagerly attempt to devalue on a daily basis.
Part of the reason for the vetocracy is the idea that unless closely monitored the government will discriminate, thus there needs to be lots of community involvement.
And who would the government be so interested in discriminating against, with all its checks and balances?
The noteworthy thing about government (our government anyway) is that it is ostensibly entirely devoted to the welfare of the people. This is not the case with General Motors or Amazon or Wells Fargo. But why are so many people so quick to agree with Reagan's unhelpful witticism about the scariest thing in the world being government saying it wants to help? Why do so many people trust their insurance companies (!) more than government-supported healthcare?
Because government is big, impersonal, and, of course, imperfect, with plenty of waste, fraud, and abuse for demagogues to point at, it has become our whipping boy. (Just listen to the anti-IRS tax avoidance ads on TV now -- portraying our imperfect system of collective burden/investment as a monster that should be destroyed.)
Constitutionally we have a very conservative system -- whereby progress is often delayed beyond the tolerable. As a result of our three branches Reconstruction took 100 years, and now many are yet again balking at the effort!
Just think about what was the catalyst for today's Trump-led charge toward totalitarianism: Obama managed to pass a healthcare bill that was based on free-market conservative principles. Yet, the Right managed to work itself up into such a lather that they proclaimed we would literally lose our country if we didn't set aside democracy in order to save it. They turned ordinary change and meager progress into the ultimate battle of civilization. But it's all a lie. Imperfect as it is, government IS here to help. It simply has no other raison d'état. Yet conservatives snicker when told we ARE the government -- because they believe their interests are furthered when government comes to a standstill or is deprecated in any way.
The upside for having a slow-moving democracy is that, thanks to our founders, it is relatively difficult to systemically subvert. Authoritarian efforts at subversion can only succeed after they convince a majority that "we the people" has little to do with our collective needs and institutions, but refers more to anarchic libertarianism.
The world you've conjured up is a bizarre one. there are many factual differences between it and the real world, like the notion that a healthcare plan based on something written by the massachusetts legislature and passed without a single republican vote (over the objection of many democrats), is based on free market principles.
But the more fascinating thing to me is your picture of the government as a whole, which as you describe it, is utterly dominated by racism xenophobia, and sadism, is obsessed with saving money, is constantly sabotaged, is on the verge of totalitarianism, and yet, IS HERE TO HELP, and should be given more money and more power. Truly it boggles the mind how you can maintain so many contradictory ideas at once.
"The noteworthy thing about government (our government anyway) is that it is ostensibly entirely devoted to the welfare of the people. "
"Ostensibly". It's good that you are at least self-aware enough to include the qualifier. But for someone who talks about how the great problem of the age is that the Evil Republicans are "rejecting reason, science, and facts", you're skipping right past the crucial fact that the government is only *ostensibly* devoted to the welfare of the people, but is *really* devoted to something else. Saying that the government is here to help, is as big a lie as any other.
The government is here to help *itself*. Sometimes the incentives align so that the government can best help itself by helping the suffering and oppressed. But then, quite often the incentives align so that Wal-Mart and Amazon can best help their owners become filthy rich by also helping the poor obtain a wide variety of consumer goods at low cost. The difference is, everybody accepts that Wal-Mart and Amazon are doing this for selfish reasons, but some of us deliberately blind ourselves to the fact that the government is doing the same thing. And blinding yourself to that, throwing out a passing "ostensibly" so you can claim you recognize the problem but then ignoring it, makes it far less likely that you'll actually get the incentives lined up in the right direction.
The only way to personify "government" is as "we the people." Your vision of government sounds more like Mitt Romney's "corporations are people too. "
The idea of a government "here to help itself" is not just sloppy, charged rhetoric, it is a fantastical caricature belonging to a tired rightwing political cartoon. Insisting that government is an entity somehow "really devoted to something else" would be utterly nonsensical except that it predictably supports today's conspiracy-minded authoritarian wannabes who, in more healthy times, would be the humble, loyal opposition -- but that would indicate they still cared about democracy.
> "The only way to personify "government" is as "we the people."
No, it's a particular group of people, with its own interests. Or do you not count the right as people? Because otherwise your theory of government seems to preclude the existence of the republicans as you describe them. Of course, that's not even getting into the more basic prol
> Insisting that government is an entity somehow "really devoted to something else" would be utterly nonsensical except that it predictably supports today's conspiracy-minded authoritarian wannabes who, in more healthy times, would be the humble, loyal opposition -- but that would indicate they still cared about democracy.
Wait, so which is it? is it the cartoon or the reality? you seem to be claiming it's both. In reality, of course, people do not magically become selfless once they enter government service, and your apparent belief that they do (unless they're republicans) does you little credit.
From where I stand, it's your "the government is We the People" that seems most analogous to Mitt Romney's "corporations are people too". Except, Romney never claimed a corporation was *all* the people, and if pressed I'm pretty sure he'd have agreed that the people who do make up a corporation are unequally represented in their interests.
Governments and corporations are both made up of a subset of the population, represent the interests of a subset of the population, and represent those interests unequally. This is an absolute fact, that anyone who prides themselves on being part of the fact-based party or tribe needs to accept. The government should, and *maybe* does, represent a broader subset of the population than does any one corporation. But if all you can do is spout silly fantasies about how the government represents all the people equally, then no way are you noticing how the people who actually run the government are privileging some interests above others.
Or you'll notice it only when it's the other party that does it, where really both parties do it and the nonpartisan bureaucrats do it most. Corporations, I trust that you and I both will recognize are representing only a subset of the people's interests, and that makes it easier to keep them in line.
One explanation: vetocracy entrenches the status quo. There are always powerful elements within the status quo who fight to keep it intact. As the hegemonic corporate and governmental forces in the US become stronger, so too do their efforts to keep the status quo in place. They sometimes claim to do this in the name of preventing bad things, but in reality, they want to prevent new things.
This seems simpler than assuming it's an unintended consequence of actually trying to protect vulnerable people. After all, the powerless lack power; the powerful do not. It's usually a better bet to think that the powerful have had greater influence in bringing about a particular state of affairs, especially when that state of affairs keeps them in power.
Can we tell a story that says, "as society gets wealthier, veto points proliferate because they're seen as a way to prevent backsliding?" We can argue whether these veto points actually work to maintain the (wealthy) status quo, but in general people are more afraid of losing what they have than gaining what they might.
I can see this in large corporations: there is a lot of lip service paid to innovation, but most effort goes into keeping the money train running.
"in general people are more afraid of losing what they have than gaining what they might"
This dynamic is surely at the heart of the administrative creep that we're calling 'vetocracy'. Early career work by Danial Kahneman Amos Tversky squarely identified the fear of loss factor as a much stronger motivation.
I don't think it's just hegemonic corporate and governmental forces that want to maintain the status quo, though. I see it play out at a much smaller, even individual-choice level.
We (in the US) still live in a country with a consumer-driven market and democratic elections. If there were enough demand to build, disrupt, innovate, and create, then I think we'd see hegemonic corporations and governments trying to deliver, albeit while trying to ensure *they* are the ones doing the building, etc.
As it stands, I think a lot of people are actually demanding something akin to the status quo. Maybe it's the cumulative effect of lots of small groups trying to protect their own narrow interests, but I can't help but feel like there's something deeper at play. It seems too pervasive throughout culture.
That might contribute, but I think it's more than that.
Why didn't progress drastically slow down right after the invention of the steam engine? Or the internal combustion engine? Or electricity? Or vaccines? Or home refrigeration? Or...?
It seems like people used to be pretty optimistic about change, despite having seen *bigger* relative improvements in their lifetimes, and so presumably being more aware of what they stand to lose.
Has the marginal value of change decreased? I guess that's the Great Stagnation argument.
That makes some sense to me in sectors where progress is a little easier to objectively define, and the costs are increasing in real terms.
But it seems like the same dynamic is at play in more trivial and subjective sectors, as well. Take fashion. I'm about as far from an expert as you can get, but it sure seems like trends have been recycled for the last 20 years or so, maybe longer. I think we've circled back to the 1980s right now (*shudder*). But at least in the 1980s this stuff was /new/.
It's not at all clear to me why the benefit of adopting a new fashion trend (differentiating yourself from those around you, and presumably from those who came before) should have gotten closer to the cost of adopting a new fashion trend (it doesn't catch on, 20 years from now you look like a dork in all your pictures).
I find it hard to believe that we've exhausted human creativity, whether it's in the form of something genuinely new or just substantial permutations on what's been done before.
You know what it is? Nostalgia. We're not just trying to protect what we have, we're trying to go back to what we think we've lost.
I would posit that it is how we determine the marginal value of investment and accretion of returns that has changed.
Are we better off investing $25 billion in Acela and putting $75 billion into LA to Seattle; or, $100 billion to just replace Acela, no one else gets anything? (Yes, we could adopt MMT and do everything. Though I have a feeling we won’t get very far down the list.) And in either case, why would the Senate, skewed towards the states not being invested in, invest? Other than as trade-offs for piddling earmarks that bring no real LT returns to Omaha?
It seems self-defeating, but it is rational game theory when seeking re-election locally.
That just means the government funded it's creditors after it went broke. People always fall for the fallacy that a mere "guarantee" doesn't cost anything.
The distinction is important because as it is phrased it sounds like the government giving money to a company and getting nothing back. Whereas with a loan program most of the loans are paid back, and the existence of the loans means that the companies keep running, paying employees, etc. so paying more taxes in the long run and stimulating the economy. So the government is often making a net gain
"Still, isn't it kind of contradictory to say the government can't do anything, and then blame regulations? Shouldn't this be a self-limiting problem?"
Most regulations originate from authority delegated to independent agencies such as the FDA, FCC, FTC, etc, etc, etc... They often have a lot of latitude to say "you can't do X" in their area of influence, but they can't appropriate funds and start a big infrastructure project without new legislation.
> Still, isn't it kind of contradictory to say the government can't do anything, and then blame regulations? Shouldn't this be a self-limiting problem? Don't we eventually reach the point where the government can't implement more regulations on itself, and then disappears in a puff of logic?
No, right? Surely any theory of how regulations slow things down hinges on accretion. If the government can't navigate the N regulations it's already passed in order to pass the N+1th... the first N are still there!
If even the private sector is experiencing this issue, wouldn't that point to the veto ratchet theory? It seems that in say 1850, a large public works project that displaced hundreds of people in a poor neighborhood would be a lot easier to pull off than now, and not just because of political will. Or maybe the only reason it would get noticed is that there's a party big enough that will take notice and try to stop it?
And as you mentioned, I'm not sure polarization and vetocracy are exactly the same. It might be that polarization leads to vetocracy, if for no other reason than to stymie the other side, but it's very easy to imagine a stuck system even with sides that get along. Klein talks about there being stagnation for the 20 years he's covered Congress, but it seems that polarization wasn't nearly as bad then as it is now.
> If even the private sector is experiencing this issue, wouldn't that point to the veto ratchet theory?
Klein's "vetocracy" isn't confined to literal vetos. Even in private organizations, oftentimes one employee or one department can put the kibbosh on a project they don't approve of. This can happen on a small scale, like the one Impossible Coworker digging in their heels over a carpeting redesign because all colors and styles other than the current one give them a headache, or an enterprise scale, which often manifests as "our department's head doesn't like your department's head and your department's head proposed this idea, so even though objectively it's a great idea, office politics dictates that we put up whatever roadblocks are afforded by our department's position within the company" - see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDXKAwzdxn4
"The US could be building our way out of the housing crisis and the climate crisis. We could be building a better education system, more advanced infrastructure. We could have more and better factories, supersonic aircraft, delivery drones, flying cars [...]"
I love this blog. But if it has one weak point it's economics. First of all, you can't start with the premise that having the government "build stuff" is better than not. You have to figure out why the marginal benefit is supposedly worth the marginal cost before you bemoan the lack of spending. A tip-off to this sloppy thinking is the sloppy use of language in talking about "building" a better "education system" as if that was a form of lasting infrastructure and not money down a rathole of special interests like teachers unions. Once Klein can make a case that "more government stuff" is a good thig we can talk about whether it's a bad thing that we don't have "more government stuff." But Klein is completely ignorant of economics. He is just a stopped-clock on the left who takes it as an article of faith that more government spending is always a good idea.
Klein apparently wants more stuff like the latest NYC subway expansion, which is surely a bargain at a mere $2.5-3.7 Billion per mile.
Part of the vetocracy at the local level is imposing extra costs. These projects are expensive, in part, because so many groups get a say in the decisions. Asking where was the vetocracy when we need it is backwards -- the vetocracy was there, it just didn't entirely kill the projects.
The NYC subway expansion arguably *was* a victim of vetocracy. The expansion was originally planned to be larger and done sooner. NYC really needs to invest in both upgrading its existing subway (there's a ridiculously expensive signal upgrade going on now too, and it should've been done decades ago) and expanding it, and the progress has been frustratingly slow for everyone. Though I haven't followed all the politics, I know one factor that illustrates the vetocracy: to upgrade, you have to close the subway occasionally, but that would be unfair to night-shift workers, so it doesn't get done. (Incidentally, covid has given them leeway to close the subway at night now.)
The marginal cost vs marginal benefit is definitely a thing, and I'd argue "vetocracy" shares a lot of underlying causes with "cost disease". E.g. excessive regulations contribute to both. Scott has written interesting articles on cost disease before, might be worth searching for it if you're interested.
Because of the vetocracy California high speed rail has morphed from something that could be very useful to a incredibly expensive way to connect two small towns no one wants to go to. The vetocracy doesn't just say no, even when it says yes it makes the process so long and expensive that nothing is worth doing.
Yeah, really. If California HSR could be built under 1950s rules, it'd be eminently worthwhile. Probably $10-20B in today's dollars for the full route from SF/Sacramento to SD.
But the flip side is that if it'd happened then, you'd probably have a couple dozen more construction workers die in the process, probably a worse traffic snarl during construction(albeit, also a shorter construction period), the workers getting lower pay and benefits, and probably a poor neighbourhood somewhere getting bulldozed. Is that worth saving a hundred billion dollars? TBH I think it would be, but I can understand why some people don't like that conclusion.
I don't think the claim is "you literally cannot build anything", the claim is "building things has become so hard that it takes vast amounts of money".
Fair enough. But I would say it's a bit always easy to just say the "government should be smarter." Making it so is the trick because the incentive structure is never there. Incentives are everything. For example, compare the engineering achievements of profit-motivated SpaceX to the politically motivated decision making of NASA that produced the Space Shuttle. There is no comparison in terms of efficiency.
SpaceX is an interesting example there because Elon Musk has explicitly made it not profit motivated. He's talked before about how he doesn't want to make it a public company because he has personal goals for the company (such as developing a colony on Mars) that don't have any profit motive. He has a limited budget to do so (though much less so now that he can funnel money in from his Tesla stock), and the various investors will want some eventual return (but that can be a very long ways off), but profit is not the primary motivation for either the heads of the company or must of the workforce.
I guess he can't help making money in spite of himself, then. They just did a small stock sale at a valuation that would make SpaceX worth about $75 billion. But I am sure he knows profits will only help him get to Mars, even if that is his real objective. In any event, he knows he's spending his own money so he has every incentive to be efficient in how he gets to his goal.
Building things takes money but not vast amounts. Building things takes an individual with an idea and vast amounts of energy, a capacity for massive amounts of obsessive work and inhuman persistence in the face of obstacles to make the thing real. I know because we are Building a Thing (otherwise known as a startup.)
A Thing can't be theorized or legislated into existence. Societies don't build Things. Governments don't build Things. It takes a person, a unique type of individual, to visualize a Thing, especially a New Thing, and cause it to exist.
Our idea was simple, a response to the pandemic and the Mask Wars. What if you could kill virus before you breathed it? What if you had clean air with you all the time? You could go anywhere, fly places even. If some people didn't want to wear masks or stay home when they were sick, that would be their problem not ours. Now, many months later, we have Alpha Thing, Beta Thing is close, we've got 20k worth of lab testing so we know the science works, and so far we've bootstrapped the whole thing. Next step we need money but not vast amounts, not yet really. From where I sit in this venture, what would have boosted us along faster would have been if we could have gotten a few more hands on deck earlier but that's tricky, you have to be really careful not to get the wrong hands on deck.
Now, what we've learned from our startup is that ideas are worthless Everyone has them! Good ones even! What gives an idea worth is the individual that makes it happen, that one person with the right combination of skills and personal traits has an idea and wills it into existence. That is rare and money can't make it happen. Money is super handy later in the process though.
Whatever obstacles stand in the way of those individuals who Build Things are where the problem is.
In order to tie "building things has become so hard that it takes vast amounts of money" to vetocracy’s blocking things, don’t we need to think about inserting “of other people’s money”?
I’m not protesting taxes, I’m addressing the distribution of investment, the MB of spending, the velocity of the money spent, the spillover benefits gained. Some trolley systems in the Midwest as part of a bill funding a brand new hi-speed rail for the NEC aren’t equivalent. Or, in current terms, they aren’t equitable as to equality of outcomes.
Could it be that the slow walk is, in part, a queuing process for funding, waiting for a Buttigieg, and control of the budget, to champion another upgrade to the NEC’s hi-speed train line? It seems that once the stars align, groups, suits, deeply held objections are quite often addressed, funding and construction begin. Almost always this is accompanied by programs funding the plaintiffs’ concerns.
The Democrats say, “Yes!”, the Republicans say, “No!”. The Democrats can wait until the ‘ayes’ have it. What they can’t allow is for Grey Tribe rationalists to say, “Yes, but....” And that I think is what is in part behind the NYT’s concern with Rationalism should it become a force in the Public debate, within the Party.
Democrats have opposed Game Theory, a real world application of Rationalism, ever since Moynihan tried to inject it into the Great Society.
No, if you try to build things with your own money, you still have to deal with the vetocracy. Try building high-density housing in the Bay Area if you doubt this.
From time to time people will find an area where the vetocrats haven't fully entrenched their position because the area wasn't seen as worth bothering to regulate, and build great and mighty works by their own effort with their own money. Consumer electronics and software, ride-share services which totally aren't taxis, online retail, space flight. Sometimes they'll even have the help of the first generation of regulators in the field, who see being able to weakly regulate something big and important as a better career move than having a stranglehold over something they've strangled in the crib.
But in mature industries, including most forms of construction and transportation, the veotocrats can block private spending almost as thoroughly as they do public spending.
Klein and Yglesias are of the opinion that building things cost way too much in the US and that the US should focus more on bringing down the cost of infrastructure. Both of them have written a lot about how it's criminal that everything costs this much per mile. They are not "all government spending is good"
Ok. But wishing things cost less isn't very useful, by itself. I've never thought of Vox as an advocate for deregulating anything, but if that's what they advocate, then more power to them.
Yglesias’s biggest hobby horse is that there should be less regulations/zoning restrictions on the rights of private land owners to build things. It’s less of Klein’s focus, but based on his recent articles he seems to agree.
Suggest repealing NEPA to Klein and see what happens. Complaining about astronomically high costs of building infrastructure and defending environmental reviews is a pure hypocrisy.
Those projects are expensive and behind schedule because of all the veto points. If we had a system where voters approved the project and there was no ability to sue those projects would be complete already and under budget.
Oh the track goes right through downtown Palo Alto? Too bad, so sad. Nothing we can do. The voters have spoken.
I think the argument would be that those things are expensive failures precisely because of vetocracy, all the additional regulations that have to be followed and delays that are imposed.
I know a few people who work on government projects, and this is certainly the impression I get - following the rules and changes imposed from above massively balloon the time, scope, and cost of everything.
Klein, and many discussing vetocracy, fail to address distribution of ‘build stuff’.
The NEC wants a $100 billion dollar (the cost will easily double) hi-speed replacement for Acela. All our building is poured into the NEC, creating hi-velocity spending with tremendous spillover and then we’re told this is justified because the area is hi growth.
There is no incentive, in the Senate, to fund a $125 billion Manhattan Seawall, a $40 billion LI Barrier, the $46 billion MTA signal upgrade, the $100 billion hi-speed.... These costs are all estimates that are surely going to ballon. So, we have a city/strip wanting half a trillion assigned just to their local projects.
Yes, there can be an argument made about GDP generated; but, 80+% of that generation stays within the region.
This is a prime reason for the drive to delegitimize, modify the Senate, eliminate the filibuster.
We’ve stopped building because many are tired of building the NEC, while listening to the Swamp wonder how to rejuvenate the interior. I’m all for a large infrastructure package as long as the first $1 trillion is spent between the Appalachians and Rockies.
Yes, people use vetocracy as part of their motivated reasoning. And there's the deeper intractable problem of knowing What's Really Good.
But would you agree that the easier it is for anyone to prevent things (independent of their merits, from any point of view), the more ungovernable a country becomes, and that this is a net bad?
I think there is certainly a threshold beyond which there are too many veto points, yes. And I also think that in certain aspects of American life (usually public but also private) there is definitely a vetocracy at work. The problem is that what constitutes vetocracy run amok (which we must address) is always going to simply be an expression of somebody's priors. I think the lack of infrastructure spending is legitimately an example of vetocracy at work - but of course, I'm in favor of significantly more public investment in general. If I wasn't, I wouldn't feel that way.
"The problem is that what constitutes vetocracy run amok (which we must address) is always going to simply be an expression of somebody's priors." For sure. Identifying any one instance of vetocracy will just reflect the biases of identifier.
And it's also objectively true that the US has more veto points than its peers, and that this generally advantages people who don't want things to change - Conservatives and small-c conservatives, which turns out to be most Americans.
Is it about "things" but about laws, regulations, etc? Most changes in people's lives have been about tech and the private sector, and those are generally slowed down by more regulations and laws.
Exactly this. There has been an increasing push for the involvement of environmental justice groups, and giving other "marginalized groups" a seat at the table among liberals in the last 10-20 years. Obviously another major veto point / coordination issue, but I would be shocked to see progressives complain about it.
Sure, but if it's preventing things that *everyone* likes, then the case for calling it 'vetocracy' is much stronger than the case for calling it 'a healthy system of checks and balances.'
Right?
Like, I acknowledge there are two sides to every argument, of course. But that doesn't mean it's impossible for one side to have a stronger case or more evidence, especially with regards to one specific example.
I feel like most Americans would have been happy with a faster Coronavirus vaccine roll-out. If I have to choose between calling the things that prevented that 'vetocracy' or 'healthy checks and balances', I don't think the difference is 'just a matter of perspective' or w/e.
The issue is that the things that "everyone" likes, they may like in the abstract, while the projects under discussion will have winners in losers in the real world.
To build an efficient transit network, you have to push some peoples' houses flat. Even if they may like the idea of the transit network, they're going to object to this exact plan. And if they have a veto point, use it to prevent the plan from going forward and forcing a redesign. Except that the people who live on the line denoted by "Plan B" can *also* do this, and so on.
This is a very good point. See, for example, the resistance to wind farms on the part of very many progressives who are generally very receptive to carbon-lowering initiatives.
I always think of Hanson's 'near-far' distinction – "carbon-lowering" is abstract and thus considered in 'far' mode, whereas a wind farm marring _my_ view of the ocean is very very much a product of a 'near' mode.
Sure, all policies have some type of tradeoff, but that doesn't mean all policies are zero-sum. In fact, almost none will be precisely zero-sum; some will be highly negative-sum, some will be highly positive-sum, and the rest will be in between.
If a system routinely prevents popular, highly positive-sum things from happening, I think it's fair to use pejoratives to describe that system, in this case 'vetocracy.' Again, see slow Coronavirus vaccine roll-out.
According to Our World in Data, the US has administered 18 doses per 100 people, higher than almost every major developed country. Canada is at 4; France at 5; Germany at 6. Among Western countries, only the UK is higher, at 26.
One way of looking at this might be that in the past, what economists call "potential Pareto improvements" (the winners gain by enough that they can afford to compensate the losers), could remain "potential" and the actual compensation didn't need to be paid. Today, the losers can insist on getting paid off (due to media shifts and to the range of veto points embedded in law and court decisions), and the dissension this creates among the coalition of winners (who gain by different amounts themselves) then prevents the needed bribery of the losers from taking place.
I think this (and many of the broader challenges) derive from the reality that our society is now so incredibly rich, we have no urgency or really any need to do anything effectively, because even if we are incredibly inefficient and suboptimal, we are still "rich" enough. If somehow our GDP were to be cut by a third - and our decisions/systems started to actually matter, I suspect we would be much more effective at dealing with these issues.
There's an interesting parallel with software bloat. The amount of resources that it took to run well built software from the 80s is astonishingly small. Programmers now are not drastically worse than programmers back then, but a lot of software is much less efficient just because hardware is so good it doesn't matter.
Though in the case of software bloat - it isn't actually a problem in many cases. It often makes more economic sense to churn out less efficient software so you can sell more quickly and generate more revenue, rather than to spend lots of time optimizing every small piece of it. No one cares if an iPhone app takes up 5 MB instead of 3MB.
The only people I know that regularly complain about software bloat are programmers! (And gamers, in particular PC gamers, tho they're much much more tech savvy than most other people.)
I think there's two aspects to this - one is that things are good enough that there's less pressure to improve; but the other is that things are good enough that a random change is likely to result in a bigger drop for someone, given that they're starting at a high point.
> the post office still needs to deliver the same amount of mail
The post office *hasn't* needed to deliver the same amount of mail, though - historically, the number was always rising as the population grew, more recently it's plummeted thanks to email and the widespread adoption of the internet in general.
Also, the post office was always this weird branch of semi-privatized government that combined the worst aspects of privatization (required to remain revenue-neutral, no tax dollars for funding) and government (having to answer to the whims of Congress), so again, not really the best example of why the government needs to consume more GDP.
This seems like it's at least in part a problem of how our institutions have scaled. We just have a lot more people than we used to, but at the same time, our institutions haven't scaled up to meet the challenges of that increased population. We have processes and procedures that make greatly amplify the voice and power of small groups of people, and those have not scaled up as well.
The NRA has a budget of $412 million and 5.5 million member, which sounds like a lot, but really doesn't amount to much when compared to the majority (66% in one poll, 75% in another) of Americans who favor gun control. If we take the lower number, 66%, that's around 240 million people. Yet somehow the NRA, with just $412M and 5.5M people, is able to hugely influence the country's gun laws.
But this isn't just a left/right thing. We could find many other examples of small groups of people exercising extremely high political leverage. Polls in the Bay Area show a clear majority favor building more housing, yet the NIMBYs seem to be winning.
Of course, the very forces that have led to this situation make it hard to fix. Any attempt to reduce the power that minority groups exercise is an existential threat to those minority groups. And of course, there is a very legitimate concern that a system which _doesn't_ have these sorts of safeguards _will_ disregard the well-being of minority groups.
Rather than removing veto points, since it's hard to know what is a safe trade-off, how about structuring them (or more of them) so they can be used at a finite rate? E.g. each caucus in Congress gets a fixed number of filibusters per term. Some veto points would be difficult to do this with -- e.g. judicial review of laws -- but where implemented it would force prioritization of vetos without eliminating them.
If there's a limit to how many times you can say "no", but not a limit to how many times I can ask, then I just need to keep asking until you run out. Then you can't REALLY veto anything, you can merely waste everyone's time.
I think this is already a problem in some areas; e.g. if the public mobilizes to protest some unpopular law and successfully gets it stopped, the minority that wanted the law can just try again later, and stirring the public to opposition becomes harder each time as the public becomes tired of hearing about this issue.
Just brainstorming here (not claiming this is a good solution, or even *a* solution at all - it just came to mind), what might it be like if the limit counted for both things - each time you filibuster, you lose a slot you could use to propose a bill.
There's a much simpler explanation for the rise of vetocracy, especially for local issues: the relevant people already have what they need, so they see no need to build more. That's the reason for the fall of supersonic aircraft -- it's not worth annoying millions of people with a sonic boom every time a businessman wants to save one hour going from NY to LA.
Decades ago when waves of middle-class families moved to the suburbs, huge highway networks were built so they could commute. So logically, there is no energy now to build good public transport for commutes; the people who would use it already have cars. But that doesn't mean that we've forgotten how to build things! When the MacArthur Maze collapsed in 2007, making lots of Bay Area commutes impossible, it was fixed under budget and in record time. The reason California can't build high speed rail but can repair the MacArthur Maze is that important people would have been fired if the Maze wasn't repaired quickly, while nobody is going to be fired if high speed rail takes another 50 years, because nobody is organizing their life around needing high speed rail.
The same dynamic explains most of the other examples. For instance, the state of public schools in large cities. There isn't going to be pressure at the top to fix them, because everybody in the upper-middle class there already has their kids in private school. That's why many private schools in the US are open now, while most public schools are closed. The same dynamic goes on with police versus private security in gated communities, the post office versus UPS, and public defenders versus lawyers. Once an alternative forms, and those that can afford it move over, the public option just decays away. Unfortunately, I've never heard of an example of this process reversing itself.
This is very insightful, and can be used to make the social democratic case for universal (vs. means-tested) social insurance / benefits and for fully public services (vs. public options in private markets): everyone benefits, and everyone is in the same boat, so there's an incentive to make keep things high-quality. This ensures that the programs survive politically (because of the universalism) and that less well-off people get good stuff (because public services don't become marginalized.)
I mean, I could also see that ending up with the public service sucking anyway, for all the reasons such things often do, but also now there's no escape for anyone and none of the benefits of allowing the competition (e.g., no one attempting any paradigm-shifting alternatives which might eventually become universal and universally better, since large, critical, and universal government services are much less able to take a long shot than "just some guy").
Yeah, that's a sensible concern. Though my anecdotal impression is that in practice, countries that have universal benefits and robust public services (Western Europe, Singapore, Japan) tend to have higher quality programs than those that don't. So at least there's a chance of making it work.
For me, it's much harder to imagine the opposite scenario: a society with public and private options where the public option doesn't become ghettoized, for the reasons knzhou pointed out.
Also, I think it's useful to distinguish between social insurance / benefits and public services here. Social insurance is making sure that everyone is insulated from risk - cutting checks to the disabled, elderly, unemployed, etc. Not sure how much paradigm-shifting innovation is really possible there. Just make it as frictionless and efficient as possible. Ditto with social benefits, which is just cutting checks for certain kinds of people you want to support - parents, low wage earners, low-income folks, etc.
Public services is where your point about fundamental innovation sticks better. For instance, maybe driverless cars will make bus service irrelevant, and governments should just give lower-income people money so they can afford the ride? Or maybe you don't need to install audible signals for blind folks at traffic lights if you can give them a portable device that does better job?
Competition doesn't get you paradigm shifting innovation. Slack along with *any* incentive for improving is what creates innovation. Financial gain is only one incentive among many possible motivations a person can have for wanting to innovate, and it is useless if an environment is so competitive that no one has sufficient slack to innovate.
Rich people have been comfortable forever, why should this be more of a problem now?
My impression is that middle-class people moved to the suburbs partly *because* it became possibly to build suburbs. Right now lots of middle class (and upper class!) people want to move to big cities like Brooklyn and SF, and we still aren't building things for them. So I don't think there's some principle that infrastructure that middle class people need will get built.
It's true that this isn't a one-size-fits-all explanation for everything. But I think the idea of common interests between the rich and the poor does explain a bunch of past successes.
Think about the glamour as new forms of mass transportation were unveiled: trains, steamboats, cars, subways, and planes. These were celebrated because they were, at the time of their construction, the fastest way for _anyone_, rich or poor, to travel the relevant route. This isn't true for adding a bit more bus service along a route where the buses are slower than cars, or a high speed rail route that's slower than air.
We were happy to implement extremely invasive and expensive regulations in the Clean Air Act, because everybody had to breathe the same air. There's no energy for doing the same for food additives amid the obesity crisis, because the upper 20% can just shop at Whole Foods.
I think it’s an under-appreciated point that upper and middle class people want to move to Brooklyn and live in a brownstone on a tree-lined street, or SF and live in a “painted lady” Victorian. The number of well-heeled people who would choose a 600-unit high rise, even one with granite countertops, over a house in the suburbs is considerably smaller.
At least with the private sector, an alternative to regulation would be liability through lawsuits: make people pay if, and only if, they cause actual harm. You could have punitive multipliers for those who fail to follow best practices in safety standards and some protection for those who actually do.
Seems that regulation is lot like enforcing pre-crime in Minority Report. If punitive measures were only focused on actual harm, not potential harm, then people could take calculated risks and much more would get done.
The issue is that "best practices" that the courts are notionally enforcing aren't something that was carved in stone by the finger of God and carried down from Mount Sinai.
For example, Ford made exactly the calculation you're talking about with the infamous Pinto, where they balanced the costs of a recall with the expected value of a life from previous lawsuits, and said that it wasn't worth fixing. When the courts heard that they made this calculation, they cranked the "damages" dial until this calculation no longer penciled out. If Ford were to make the same calculation with the new costs of a life, the court system would crank that dial again. The costs of liability are not an exogenous variable, they're capturing an implicit value judgement.
In some ways, this kind of "regulation by jury" is *more* opaque, because your lawyers can't tell you what the regulations *are*, they have to tell you what they *might be* after a jury hears about it.
It's precisely that uncertainty that makes it so big business has a strong incentive to follow best practices. Ford gets hosed in court, so GM and Chrysler make sure not to take the same risks. The main difference is that small businesses have have the option of going a high risk route. It's like the small time entrepreneur who forgoes fire insurance for a year to get through startup costs - he might be ruined, but he at least has the chance to compete, when he would otherwise be excluded from the market.
I should also add that having a fixed penalty, whether for smoking in a hotel room or picking your kid up late from daycare, makes it transactional - that is now the cost of doing this action, rather than having any other discouraging effect.
Lawsuits, unlike criminal trials, require the parties to pay for their own lawyers. To the extent that various legal rights are protected through legal liability, people with enough money to hire lawyers somewhat consistently have those rights while poorer people can't consistently punish the infringement of those rights and so have them infringed on more often. If regulation were replaced with legal liability, this infringement of the rights of the less wealthy would probably get worse (short of some sort of extension of the 6th Amendment to civil trials, and even that would likely suffer some of the same problems as current public defenders.
Class action lawsuits solve some of that problem and switching over to a loser pays attorney fees system would help as well. For the small stuff, expanding small claims courts could also help.
Well, there is a third possibility here -- government regulation, but enforced by spot checks rather than requiring passing tests in advance. (E.g., how restaurant inspections work; I gather a lot of things work this way in Europe as well?) This may be able to get a lot of the benefit of the liability route without the drawback that is the cost of litigation? Of course ideally we'd have a simpler/cheaper legal system and be able to just go the liability route without there being any such drawback, but as things are...
On a slightly tangential note, the late Roman Republic was absolutely a vetocracy. Reading about it, I was blown away by just how many officials had veto power. Imagine if the US Senate tried to pass a law and the Mayor of DC vetoed it. That's approximately what the Roman Republic was like. Part of what made Caesar so popular is that there was a huge backlog of popular policy changes that virtually everyone knew were necessary but couldn't get past someone's veto.
The Roman Republic was in some respects even worse in limiting magistrates' ability to get anything done because those magistrates often had direct control over parts of the military rather than having their rulings enforced indirectly, and it was feared that if they got too much power they would use that military force to overthrow the Republic. The limitation of the powers of (e.g.) Caesar and Pompey came from the fear that they would use stronger powers to make themselves dictator, as Sulla had done and Caesar would eventually do.
Yes. This is exactly why the Roman Republic turned into the Empire. We really are following the same path. We have to get rid of the malapportioned Senate, *in particular*, to avoid the same demand for the removal of the system in favor of something which can *get popular policy changes done*.
The UK threaded this needle with the Reform Acts and the Parliament Act.
One reason we "can't build stuff" (or, perhaps, just another way to say the same thing) is that "building stuff" is too expensive. It's not a secret at this point that construction costs are much, much higher in the US than elsewhere in the First World. It shouldn't be a secret, either, that construction costs were much cheaper here in the relatively recent past.
Consider an example from DC. The NoMa Metro station was completed in 2004 at a final construction cost of $104 million, or $137 million in 2018 dollars. By comparison, the Potomac Yards station budget was revised upward in April 2018 from $268 million to $320 million. I am unfamiliar with the details of either project (and I suspect that construction in Virginia away from an already-finished neighborhood would be easier), but it is inconceivable to me that in just 14 years, the cost of a comparable project can more than double in inflation-adjusted terms.
At my own employer, a large urban water utility, the cost of replacing water pipes has become so prohibitive (and there are so many other construction cost pressures) that we barely do it despite explicitly promising the public that we will. On a per-mile basis, costs have jumped from the $10 million-or-so range to upwards of $50 million or even more.
The vetocracy is one potential cause, and an important one. One project I am familiar with (urgently demanded by the public it would serve, and where the need was widely-recognized!) took 10 years to go from design to construction as various permits were applied for and reviews were conducted. But I think it's only one item on a long list of candidates. The NYT pointed their finger (in late 2017 or 18) in an article about the 2nd Ave Subway at a negative-feedback loop between politicians who like more jobs and don't care about efficiency and unions who like having more members and don't care about efficiency. I've seen explanations that include things like US safety regulations (way more rulebound and stupid than Europe's), the Americans with Disabilities Act (check out South American transit infrastructure for wheelchair accessibility), more middlemen and markups, environmental rules, allocation of financial risk, free public health insurance elsewhere, actual corruption, hidden inflation due to monetary policy, fewer illegal immigrants making labor more expensive, and others.
My own suspicion is that a CYA mindset and lack of competence has ruined the engineering profession in this country. Spec documents are enormous, byzantine, and require a huge amount of effort and expense to even write bids for. Why? Because someone got screwed by some shady contractor at some point in the past. The response wasn't to find better contractors that can be trusted, it was to add cruft to the system. Ultimately, only enormous firms that can afford the initial outlay can bid, and they make it all back in the cost of construction (since all bidders include that cost in their bids, even a fair, corruption-free competition doesn't help). Plus, our engineers tend to suck, lacking experience at actually building things and lacking the ability to detect bullshit from bidders, designers, construction managers, etc.
Even those who decry how much gets paid for this stuff don't seem to be able to fix the system and clean house.
I know that from the federal government side, we can't just "find better contractors that can be trusted" because *we're* not trusted to make those judgements. It's more-or-less a "right" to bid on a contract, and that right can't be taken away without a very high burden of proof.
This lack of trust happened, of course, because of previous Government employees who _couldn't_ be trusted, and were steering work to people giving them kickbacks. It may have ended up that passing rules to try to avoid the kickbacks may have cost more than the corruption, but in fairness to the original reformers, that this would become the case may not have been apparent to them at the time.
I vaguely remember a Megan McCardle post/article explicitly about how 'corruption' was simply one of the costs we paid to get things done and that it wasn't obviously, on net, a bad tradeoff.
> Consider an example from DC. The NoMa Metro station was completed in 2004 at a final construction cost of $104 million, or $137 million in 2018 dollars. By comparison, the Potomac Yards station budget was revised upward in April 2018 from $268 million to $320 million. I am unfamiliar with the details of either project (and I suspect that construction in Virginia away from an already-finished neighborhood would be easier), but it is inconceivable to me that in just 14 years, the cost of a comparable project can more than double in inflation-adjusted terms.
The projects are similar, but not quite apples to apples - I think a pretty critical detail is that the NoMa station was in a bit of a shitty urban area with not much going on pre-Metro station, whereas Potomac Yards is prime waterfront property located tantalizingly close to Amazon HQ2, with the station planned as a centerpiece for a new community, with elevated pedestrian paths and all sorts of frills.
These are both infill stations, so "already-finished neighborhood" is a bit of a misnomer - all that was fundamentally required at NoMa was slapping a station around already-cleared right-of-way along an elevated track.
I'm fairly confident the cost difference isn't due to property acquisition - is that not right? Potomac Yards was planned before Amazon decided to come to DC; the area is hot in part because of the success of other infill Metro stations. The fact that they're both infill stations should make them more comparable, not less - the track and ROW were already there in both cases.
> I'm fairly confident the cost difference isn't due to property acquisition - is that not right?
Ritzier property means higher taxes and that has nebulous offshoots with liability insurance and all sorts of other stuff.
> Potomac Yards was planned before Amazon decided to come to DC
But plans for it were expanded after Amazon announced HQ2. And, critically, Potomac Yard is not in DC. It's in Alexandria, which stopped being a part of DC back in 1846.
> the area is hot in part because of the success of other infill Metro stations.
NoMa (original name: New York Avenue) is literally the only infill Metro station.
> The fact that they're both infill stations should make them more comparable, not less - the track and ROW were already there in both cases.
The fact that they're both infill stations is why I said "not quite apples to apples" and not "apples vs oranges". But they're being designed under completely different circumstances, in completely different areas. You can build identical McMansions in St. Louis and San Francisco, but expecting them to have similar costs (even after factoring for land acquisition) is not the way it's done - and NoMa and Potomac Yard aren't identical McMansions, either.
> I don't know the specifics of the two jurisdictions, but by reputation, anyone who says it's easier to build in DC than VA would be laughed out of the room. Perhaps those reputations are undeserved.
> Fair. Other infill development/redevelopment would have been more accurate. Examples include Columbia Heights, DC's Wharf, Navy Yard
> How are the circumstances different between the two stations? I don't accept that either the area or the circumstances are completely different: there's an excellent chance that the contractors who bid are all the same firms, even. Is fancier construction/more bells and whistles enough to explain a >2x difference? If so, why didn't they drop the frills when the project began to get so expensive? There's been an ongoing fight over just having a second entrance to the station, due to cost, but its removal will save something like $50 million.
"First, is vetocracy the same as polarization? ... I'm not sure how Klein thinks of this. " Klein has clarified the difference and the interaction in a number of interviews I've heard. The idea is basically what how you put it - "vote points + polarization = gridlock" - and the prime example is indeed the filibuster.
"And a lot NIMBYism is unrelated to the Democrat/Republican divide." It's true that people's diverse identities have been subsumed into their national political identities, which have in turn polarized. This has affected state politics as well. But local land use is the one area where this hasn't happened, because it's where people have actual skin in the game, and their self-interest overrides national narratives. Witness "pro-climate" New York liberals opposing grid-scale solar farms being built near their second homes in the Hudson Valley. Everybody's a libertarian until the neighbor wants to build something you don't like.
"Second, why is this happening?" Tyler Cowen's book the Complacent Class gives a cultural argument for this: people across the political spectrum have become more averse to change, so we get stagnation because that's what people want.
To me, cases like California and NYC give the lie to the "polarization enables vetocracy" view. Relative to US polarization they're effectively political monocultures, yet they're notorious for being terrible at building things at the state / local level.
I think the existence of veto points precede national polarization. But if you mean "polarization worsens vetocracy," that doesn't mean other forces don't as well.
The more general idea here may be "political dynamics with lots of competing interests and low emphasis on cooperation worsen vetocracy." At the national level, the polarized political parties use vote points to paralyze government. At the California and NYS levels, it's different actors: old people who don't want their taxes raised, local community boards that oppose development, etc.
Whoever else we blame for "vetocracy", I doubt it can be Robert Moses or his opponents-- at least not directly. The backlash against Moses was mostly in the 60's AFAICT, and this data suggests subway costs at least (one commonly cited kind of infrastructure that's gotten harder to build) had their biggest increases pre-1940 and post-1988.
I agree the Moses backlash is not the main thing driving up subway costs. However, there is a direct line from Moses to vetocracy, at least in NY. For example, Amazon's HQ2 development was vetoed by the PACB. The PACB was created as part of the Moses backlash. More here: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/02/15/amazon-new-york-225077/
Fundamentally there really isn’t a mechanism to decrease the size of civic bureaucracy. As an example, unincorporated communities within a county can become a city but I’ve never heard of cities merging or self abolishing. The same goes for government agencies who are structurally incentivized to grow their rice bowl (budget). Perhaps institutions need term limits or expiration dates.
As an aside, I don’t agree with the idea that corporate governance suffers from too much oversight. Corporate Governance trends generally follow the business cycle with frothy times leading to dual class shares and other insanely favorable mechanisms for management.
There are some cities (small ones) that unincorporate. They're often accused of nefarious motives in attempting to avoid some of the obligations they'd have if they were a city.
What possible reason would anyone have for ceasing to be a city if NOT "avoiding the obligations of being a city"? Why would that be an objectionable reason?
Would we complain if someone retired from politics to avoid the obligations of being a politician? If a soldier left the army so that they wouldn't need to fulfill the obligations of being a soldier?
If there are some obligations that we don't feel OK letting people dodge by not-being-a-city, then maybe those obligations ought to be tied to something other than being-a-city?
“Third, if the government can't do anything, why aren't we a libertarian paradise?”
One of the things Reason likes to harp on is that an increasing piece of the budget is non-discretionary and spent automatically, i.e. the vetocracy prevents us from spending less
Perhaps, people are increasingly disconnected from how anything actually gets done, or made, or built. Many of my former classmates hold jobs where they don't come into contact with anyone who directly does anything. I have one where I do, but I specifically sought it out. Water utilities, power utilities, etc often have to do public education campaigns just to remind people that they exist, show them how they work, and inform them that those resources don't appear by magic.
Perhaps we take for granted that material goods will be plentiful and cheap, and that any one barrier placed in one person's or company's way will be overcome - and when those goods do become unavailable, the blame is put on vast impersonal forces ("systemic racism causes food deserts"; "housing is a human right") when simple economics (as warped by government interventions or otherwise) are more likely the cause.
I don’t really see why you struggle to square a big, sclerotic government with a lack of proactive policymaking / ‘building’. Historically, that’s a common combination. By the 80s, the Soviet State was simultaneously big and useless. Given we have plenty of other real-life examples, we shouldnt really focus on how it works abstractly, although, just for the record, the abstract answer is just as easy: making and enforcing rules is a lot easier than creating what the rules regulate. The rest is just a mixture of rent seeking and status quo bias.
This doesn't answer the "why now?" question, but an intermediate answer as to "why the veto points" is that we're simply a lot less callous* than people were up through about the early '70s. They wanted to build this stuff more than we do.
I'm going to confine my comments to infrastructure, because I am most familiar with it. But what you see is that we want other stuff more than we want to build infrastructure. In earlier generations, they wanted the infrastructure.
Any time you put a conditional on a project, you are implicitly saying you want that condition more than you want the project. The simplest one everybody is familiar with is cost: you generally have a maximum amount you're willing to spend, and if the project costs over that, well, you don't build. But this applies to other things.
If you say, "We want high-speed rail, but we don't want to displace people to do it" you're saying "We want to avoid displacing people more than we want high-speed rail." The previous generation that built stuff may have had a vague wish to not displace people, but when push came to shove and it turns out that efficient highway routing meant somebody was going to get displaced, well, pick the cheapest land (i.e., poor neighborhood) and push it flat. But if you can't satisfy the conditional statement, ehhh, if you're smart you say "we can't do this because the problem is overconstrained" but since admitting we can't build high-speed rail under these conditions is politically unacceptable, we flail around for decades trying to find an answer.
Not only do we not want to displace people (rich people because we have to buy the land at fair-market value which blows up the costs of the project and poor people because that has racial implications), but we've got a laundry list of other things as well. The combination of these mean that there is no solution that can provide the infrastructure and satisfy these demands. I cannot emphasize how much easier it was for previous engineers, who cut this Gordian Knot by simply not worrying about it.
As a less theoretical example, I'll talk about something from my job. Because I don't want to get fired, I'm going to mix things up to avoid identifying specifics, but I'll ask you to believe that what I'm saying is at least "truthy" if not the exact sequence of events.
I have a project where we've been tasked to pass juvenile fish around a dam so they can go to the ocean to spawn. However, this dam actually *had* a system, that was built into the dam when it was constructed, which was early 50's to mid-60s. However (×2), the system...didn't work. Fish mortality was very high, and other issues meant that even what few adults made it weren't returning. The answer at the time was to abandon the system in place.
Now, looking over documents and the original design, I believe that this system was a relatively good-faith effort to provide this passage. When I first saw it (with little experience in fish passage systems) I had to have somebody explain to me *why* it didn't work, because it seemed like it should to my little structural engineer brain. But, and this is the point of my rambling post, when it *didn't* work, they didn't desperately try to figure out how to make it work, or start on a new system that might have worked, they said, "Well, I guess we tried," threw in the bulkheads, turned around, walked away, and agreed to never speak of this again. Then three generations later a court told the Executive Branch that we needed to figure out how to make it work, and we've not come up with an answer that won't cost in the low 9 figures, because it turns out it's *really hard*.
So that was their decision matrix: Try to pass fish, and if it doesn't work, fuck it. I want to emphasize that this is a fundamental value difference! If you had told them that they shouldn't build the dam because it will cause a dramatic reduction in fish populations, they would have looked at you like you had a dick growing out of your forehead. That just...wouldn't have mattered to them. They weren't going around hating the fish, they just didn't think there was a value there that justified the loss of flood control that halting the project would have represented. They wouldn't have minded if their system *did* work, and would have been proud if it did, but it's proper functioning wasn't a *requirement*, either.
* "Callousness" may not be exactly the right word, but my vocabulary is failing me ATM.
Well, it's not *exactly* that cost became no object. Cost really wasn't an object in some of these "failure is not an option" projects before. They often wasted *PHENOMENAL* amounts of money.
For example, the Manhattan Project wasted huge amounts of money because they weren't sure what would work. The history of that project is littered with false starts, because if something *might* work, they tried it. Many of these things didn't work, but they basically just didn't worry about that. They were just very, very lucky that General Groves was honest. It turns out that to purchase uranium ore, the Government ended up providing him a slush fund banking account *in his own name* to purchase ores that may have become available. He just didn't use this power to line his own pockets. Plus you realize that both Oak Ridge and Hanford were condemned on basically his judgement alone. The GOVERNORS of the states of Tennessee and Washington had no veto over his decisions--they were just informed that the land for these facilities was being seized for war-related purposes, and they weren't either told the purpose or given an opportunity to protest. Imagine being the homeowner who came home from your farm field to find a notice stapled to your door that you had 30 days to leave your house, or you'd be frog-marched out by Military Police!
Or the Apollo Project. They weren't *quite* as wasteful as the Manhattan Project, but they still wasted a lot of money. NASA's official history is here: https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4204/contents.html
Reading it, they discuss that the way Launch Complex 39 works (they erect the rocket in the Vertical Assembly Building, carry it to the pad with the crawler-transporter, then launch it) is only cost-efficient if they make 15 launches per year. But they only made 15 launches *total*. They knew that building it would be a waste of money by about 1964 or '65, but since redesigning everything to be more cost efficient would have meant missing the end-of-decade goal, they just wasted the money.
Nowadays, we worry about wasting the money, and not making the deadline. Which often ends up costing more than just wasting the money.
Thanks, this was a really good and well informed post. I have the impression that in the 1950's and 1960's dams were going from 'yes, save us from mass destruction from floods' to 'why a dam again?' from my grandmother who moved in afterwards talking about the dam at Branson Mo.
You must be talking about Table Rock Dam. I was stationed at Fort Leonard Wood for about 5 years, so I'm a bit familiar with the area, though I only went to Branson once in that time.
I do think this is something worth noting. I've talked with coworkers before about how we need to be better about PR for our dams and that we should put a video on YouTube every year showing what flooding would have looked like for that water year without flood control projects. The example I use is how anti-vaxxers seem a lot more credible these days than they did back when vaccines were invented.
Nowadays, everybody has sort of forgotten about how the river would eat you on a fairly frequent basis. Once dams were in place to cut down on the frequency of flooding, just like vaccines cut way back on the number of kids who were turned into shamboling zombies who spent their lives in an iron lung, people kinda forgot about how amazing it was to go from floods occurring every 5 to 10 years to being a once in a lifetime event.
Of course, you need to correct this viewpoint, because it's from a guy whose dick gets hard when looking at dams. For me, standing in an unwatered navigation lock looks like something out of the Lord of the Rings, so you can't really take my word for it. Maybe it really isn't worthwhile to make the environmental tradeoffs, but that's something that should be decided with rational discussion, rather than wibbling about how the loss of snail darter habitats makes you feel.
Not sure those are great examples. Both are unique circumstances with specific, national security motivations; cost was explicitly no object. Was there similar waste in building I-70, or the Chrysler Building, or Hyperion sewage treatment plant?
Hmmm, I was more trying to approach this from a perspective of, "They were focused on way different stuff" and trying to illustrate that. They weren't going to start doing the squirrel-hand-washing thing and fretting about something so simple as wasting money, but your reading is a fair interpretation of my remarks. I apologize, but ask you to consider that I was about two glasses of wine deep when I made the comment, and I'm about three glasses now.
You work in the construction industry, so this example might have more resonance to you than some rando off the street: people killed while building Hoover Dam. When I went there as a kid to do a tour with my parents, they did mention that 112 people died while building the dam. At the time, I just kinda treated it as a fact of life. "Huh. A bunch of people died while building this huge thing." Another note is that the bid came in within about $40,000 of the estimate, so there was no cost overrun worth discussing.
As an adult who spent nearly a decade in the Army and then moved over to the construction industry as a civilian engineering employee, I think you might have the same response I do: "*HOLY. JESUS. FLYING. FUCK. THEY. KILLED. ONE-HUNDRED AND TWELVE. PEOPLE. ON. THIS. CONSTRUCTION. PROJECT*."
One of my favorite? sites on the Internet that I use to illustrate "The past is a different country" is the Bureau of Reclamation's website about the fatalities building Hoover Dam.
That page has individual pages for each year of construction, which are then broken down by cause, and by date within each cause. This makes it a bit difficult to really see what I'm talking about. So to focus on what I mean, let's talk the fatalities for the year 1933, which was the first big year for construction (the previous years being dominated by analysis by the engineers and mobilization by the Contractor):
Because it's broken up by cause, the dates don't jump out at you at first. But look at them. Somebody died on the first of the year due to a fall, a couple people killed by explosions on Jan 10th & 11th, another fall on Feb 1, another guy hit by falling material on Feb 7th.
And it just goes *ON AND ON. THEY HAD A FATAL ACCIDENT EVERY TWO WEEKS ON AVERAGE FOR THE BEGINNING OF THAT YEAR.*
Can you imagine even the most callous jobsite superintendant you've had finding this *remotely* acceptable these days? Or even your own office as an Owner (which I think you're approaching this from)? Just let that page wash over you for a few seconds, and IMAGINE what your life would be like if you had that many people killed on a jobsite. I know that even in the US Government, we'd straight-up fire a contractor for something even a tenth that bad. For Scott, if you do end up reading this, imagine that you have two or three people drop dead in your Practice's office after you prescribed them drugs to imagine how gut-wrenchingly horrific you'd find this by modern standards. That's what it was like to build infrastructure before about 1950.
That's how much they wanted to build infrastructure. Compare that to how much we *don't* today, when we would not find this acceptable.
While I don't want to go back to the standards of the early 20th century, I think that safety functions as a one way ratchet due to fear of being blamed for rolling back a safety measure, in particular we are not judged for deaths caused through delay or inaction as long as its part of the status quo.
For that last one, people might not be as familiar with the site, so let me lay it out for you. The guys standing on the floor on the left are on the turbine hall deck at +55.0 feet above seal level (ASL). The draft tube, which is the bottom of the shaft they are all standing over for this photo is something like -35.0 feet (again, drunk right now). That's right, 35 feet *below* sea level, or a nine-story drop from where all these guys are standing.
What's common between both of these photos? Not a single fall-protection harness on anybody. If anybody slipped in either photo, they'd fall to their doom. And these are mere photo opportunities! They were done solely to have a cool picture! Today, these would be "Exhibit 1" in the lawsuit about how utterly uncaring these contractors were. But they were something that the contractor (and in the latter photo, the Government) wouldn't care a whit about having in the public eye in the mid- to late-30's.
When I worked grain bin construction, my boss told us about a previous big job he worked on where someone got his and said yes, guys get killed in any big construction job, well okay. His brother smushed his thumb in a low gear motor, I cut my back crawling through a hole under a pressed aluminum ladder, foreman fell off the roof and broke his ankle, within a couple days one hot August fifteen years ago. Well okay. Maybe they say they don't 'find this acceptable' nowadays but I'd say they just bury it or use it for shakedowns.
Could this have something to do with prices of medical expenses these days?
I know someone who suffered a workplace accident and is not able to get adequate treatment. He is out of work because the injury left him with debilitating headaches (so he has no employer insurance), and worker comp won't even pay for him to see a doctor, except once in a few months (and sometimes it has to be their doctor); they also keep refusing to cover prescribed medications. At one point, the doctor they sent him to said "I want you to know that I have nothing against you, but I am working for your insurance."
I am guessing worker comp did not have to spend so much money on workplace injuries due to medical help being cheaper (and maybe easier to get?) before. Maybe that could be one of the factors?
This really makes me think of the Pareto principle, also known as 80/20, where 80% of the problems are caused by only 20% of the causes.
It's also well-known in programming: 20% of the features are 80% of the costs. So if you are willing to give up on (part of) those 20%, you can really cut costs.
It's ultimately also a question of flexibility. Perhaps we've democratized and bureaucratized so much, that our demands of the people who build or otherwise create things have become set in stone. We are no longer able to take a step back and say: "It costs THAT MUCH? Fuck it."
This x1000. I had the opportunity to visit a Chinese mega-project (pretty late in construction, when they were just putting the finishing touches on it). There were workers on the bamboo frames of scaffolding (there were no actual floor boards) installing lighting 30 feet up with no fall protection. The workers' living quarters were...not up to western standards. It would never fly in the US.
The solution is to create competition and allow institutions to fail. USG can create competing regulatory agencies that operate in different locations. (like state competition but more intense). This even solves the career suicide problem, since only that agency will fail and not others. (FDA2 vs FDA1 etc). Tax dollars only go to institutions that a person chooses which can be a mechanism for failure or something like that. A vibrant China could also kick start the USG back into power
I'm surprised that neither Ezra Klein nor Scott have mentioned that perhaps the U.S. is just too big and diverse to have any sort of effective centralized plans that appeal to a large enough slice of the population. We trumpet our national space programs and considering the tiny budget of NASA as a % of the federal budget it is indeed pretty good and while there's no doubt that it does favor a few congressional districts it is also focused on something outside the US - namely, well, space. Any big project that seems to favor one state, city or district is immediately thought of as "pork" before any objective evaluation is made and perhaps in a country as big and diverse as this, we can't hope to achieve the use of objective criteria to evaluate projects that would benefit the "nation." Yes, DoD R&D (which consumes more than 40% of all federal R&D spending according to the Congressional Research Service) might also fall in this Focused Outside the US category but my own experience in DoD R&D suggests it has succumbed to far too much congressional 'steering' and less basic science. Hard to see this country getting behind any big future projects without an immediate existential threat creating urgency. Private R&D seems to be 'steering' most investments now and, of course, only if there's money to be made within the near-term. For example, it's hard to envision any transportation system that isn't reliant on expanding paved surfaces and moving single persons around in several thousand pound boxes even when it makes little sense objectively; there's just too much money invested in roads and road-dependent suburbs and we are tied to too much sunk-cost fallacy thinking. The ever increasing cost of just maintaining what we have - whether it's roads, social security, or the size of the military will continue to suppress any ability to create new things. We've gotten too big, too old, and too focused on 'what's mine.'
The vetocracy dynamic is at alive and well at the state and local level. It's not just about the size and diversity of the modern US. Besides, the US was geographically the same size and pretty close to equally diverse during the peak building phase.
I agree but on a smaller scale/on a local level the vetocracy becomes more discernible and can be debated in detail. I look around at my own small town and find numerous examples. Yes, it takes a lot of unpaid effort but the vetocracy can be overcome at the local level (arguable at the state level where influence is wielded by well-paid lobbyists). I stand by my thesis that federal efforts for any inwardly focused large-scale effort (equivalent to the interstate highway effort) will become more and more difficult. I think the outcome will be a looser confederation in the long-run where state-by-state and locality vs locality competition becomes the norm.
Maybe I'm misreading. Is it fair or a straw man to call this an appeal to (slightly more) unchecked majoritarianism? I feel like the Federalist Papers, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bryan Caplan have already staked pretty fertile ground here. Any proposal should at least mention why they were all wrong in passing.
I.e., would "fewer vetoes" really have been better under [politician you don't like]?
As anyone, I want the state to get more power to do things I like and less power to do the things I don't like. I like weird things though, so "more power in general" sounds orthogonal to that. Not opposed to my interests, per se, some good some bad. Just about perpendicular, plus or minus 10 degrees. So I'm honestly pretty ambivalent.
What if "more" or "less" power to do things just isn't the right dial to turn?
Like... If we're really worried about signal/noise ratio, say you have a staticky radio, maybe instead of debating which way to turn the volume... Why not turn the other dial?
How about...
Everything needs 70/100 votes, which is a nutty vetocracy. But wait! There are all these neat fun ways to earn extra credit.
- If you propose your policy run for 5 years as an RCT distributed across the various zip codes or whatever, and set metrics and targets, and if you meet those at the end of 5 years the policy expands, and if you miss the policy sunsets, then you get 10 free votes in favor.
- If your policy passes some conditional metric on prediction markets, you get 10 free votes in favor.
- If you like bipartisanship, then maybe if your policy gets at least 25 votes from at least two different parties, you get 10 free votes.
- If your legislation just names a post office or landmark or endorses a symbolic statement without actually changing anything, you get negative 10 votes.
- If some "group we like" endorses the legislation, it gets a few extra votes. Maybe this is a duly appointed panel of experts, or the CBO, or a group protecting the interests of some element of our society we like and support. To be honest, this one probably collapses under its potential for abuse. But it is something you could play with if you wanted to tilt things in favor of certain groups, much as the bicameral legislature currently does for states, or the Supreme Court does for, I don't know, elite lawyers obsessed with nuanced paradoxes in meta level rulemaking, or however you'd prefer to characterize them.)
I'm optimistic that meta-level fixes often sidestep political issues (or can be carried by one political party and not easily jettisoned later). Expanded CBO reviews were a technical, meta-level patch, and while originally pushed with partisan rhetoric, they were sticky across administrations because it's hard to oppose the basic premise that you should have (semi-)independent net cost reviews. I think anti-pork measures are an attempt at a technical patch (though I think that one may have had complex unintended side effects).
Certainly you're right though that there are some domains where the policy impacts are more obvious, so the meta-patch just becomes a proxy for whatever political fight. And the more dramatic the change (like the ones I originally proposed), the more it will prompt questions about who really benefits.
I'm still convinced technical, meta-level tweaking to improve the quality of output is the most fertile ground, and would outperform ideas about simply increasing or decreasing state power (either direction) in terms of political viability and consistent positive effects.
But the proof of the pudding and all that, hard to say. Not sure if there's a "good governance" think tank that only looks at meta-level questions of organizing government. There probably should be something like that (but I doubt it would get any support or have any influence!)
I can think of precisely no time in the history of the US when having the Senate was an improvement. If it had been abolished in 1789 before the Constitution was finished, as far as I can tell, literally everything would have gone better, under politicians I like, and under those I don't.
I feel like I see similar things in corporate structures. Fear from mistakes can hamstring you to the point of not taking on crazy projects that could have a really large upswing in payout. And it isn't like all fear is unwarranted. There are plenty of honestly bad ideas floated as projects all of the time. Thing is, some of them succeed for no real reason that was predictable ahead of time.
It is frustrating, as I want to tell folks to take those ridiculous ideas and run with them. But I also don't want to lie to anyone if their idea is likely going to fail. Nor do I want to let folks run down a road to failure if I don't know that they can recover from it.
To that end, is this something that grows into things? Another rehashing of startup versus establishment?
You're quite focused on the doing more/doing less trade-off. I would view this problem in terms of *what* the government is able to do. Regulations - often in the form of telling companies "you can't do that" - look to me like they can be standing in the way of getting stuff (excluding bossing people around) done. See, for example, regulations standing in the way of covid tests and protective equipment early in the pandemic. On housing, the government is great at saying you can't build any higher there, you need to make an underground parking garage, etc.
Bottom line, I don't think that you have to be all or nothing. Making cumbersome regulations is one thing the government is good at. Procuring things (face masks) for the armed forces is something the government is bad at. No contradiction!
The vetocracy does not just exist outside organizations. Organizations do a great job of killing projects internally long before they reach the public eye.
If your department becomes more efficient, you can look forward to a budget cut next year. If your department fails, you can blame circumstances outside your control (the economy, the weather, old infrastructure, whatever) and say that more money is needed to deal with those problems.
Time to hire replacement employees is measured in years. Someone's not doing a good job? The standard of comparison is: are they better than literally noone at all. And that's for management, where you have the option to fire someone! If they're union, there's no point in even considering it.
Promotions are extremely slow, because there is no growth. There's never a new division being created that you can promote the up-and-comer to go run. People are promoted when someone up the ladder retires. And at each rung, it's 3-5 candidates per, each time. Performance isn't irrelevant, but there's rarely enough to go around. Good people will stick around for ~5 years, realize they're going nowhere, and head to greener pastures.
Randomly, someone who sucks will impress an Important Leader. That person will then rocket up the org chart to some newly-created position with a newly-impressive salary. More than anything else, this kills the morale of the handful of actually effective employees being told to bide their time and pushes them out.
Management is always into the latest buzzwords and fads, but lacks the energy to truly embrace them and the force to implement them (nobody's going to get fired, and the long-timers know they're not getting promoted). As a result, management initiatives are frequent, but greeted with eyerolls and then ignored.
You can propose a good project with a strong ROI. Everybody will agree that it sounds like a great idea and would certainly help the organization reach its goals. It will then be met with the following objections: (1) we can't do it for legal reasons. (2) we don't have the money to build it now, even if it will pay off over time. (3) nobody here knows how to do it, and we aren't capable of hiring anyone. (4) if we did it, it would piss off someone important. (5) we can't do anything until we have considered every possible project and ranked them- if we did something other than the top priority first, that would be inefficient. (6) none of the people who we would hire to do this are women/minorities/veterans/whatever. (7) not all of the people who would benefit most from this are women/minorities/veterans/whatever. (8) if we built it, we couldn't operate it. (9) if we could operate it, we couldn't maintain it. (10) it's much too risky.
This used to be easy. Stage a Civil War, a World War, a Great Depression, or something of that nature once or twice a generation. Something severe enough that the usual veto points are simply tossed out of the window and progress gets made. (Too bad about those innocent Japanese-Americans.)
But the last one of those ended before I was born, and I'm old enough to have adult children. Apollo and Vietnam were carefully kept from growing quite that drastic. Then Vietnam and Watergate led to such mistrust of government that removing veto points became 3x harder.
Mancur Olson did some research on that. He argued that the UK was the "sick man of Europe" while Germany was booming in the post-war era because Germany was starting over from scratch, while the UK had grown sclerotic with things like labor unions (much more divided into crafts than in Germanic countries where a single organization might cover a huge swathe of the population) preventing anything from getting done.
Yes but no. No: the UK built a massive welfare state in a few years after the War. People may argue about whether that was progress or regress, but it was done. Yes: in 1970s Germany, I once overheard someone say that the British had been the real losers, judging by long-term outcome. But: Olson knows much more than I do
The guys you overheard were from western Germany, right? The comparison to UK is unfair; UK was not a cold war front state with a comparable opposite right across the border and therefore supported from abroad. How great would Germany's 'Wirtschaftswunder' have been if the situation had been different?
Postwar UK economic problems where entirely the result of their poor economic decision making. Germany was not leveled to the ground, most of the german state and law survived the war, so there was no fresh ground. the difference is that they made better choices, germany left rationing several years before the UK did, and UK's commitment to full employment destroyed international competitiveness in areas they did have advantages, like aerospace. The germans also had to maintain a substantially larger army for most of the cold war and were growing from a poorer base, but were still richer than the UK by the 70s.
Given the events of the past year, it's unclear to me that major shocks to the system will have the effect you want.
Though, we did get two things out of the pandemic. The first is mRNA vaccines. The second is telework. My workplace made excuses for years as to why workers couldn't use remote access to work from home. The system already existed - it's just that most people were not allowed to use it. We instantly won that battle when the pandemic started.
The explanation I’ve heard from Klein on his podcast is that they reinforce each other. Vetocracy, where nothing is getting done, leaves politicians with less of substance to talk about, so that public discourse tends toward more and more symbolic— and polarizing—stuff. And the post already described the other direction, where polarization leads to the veto points being utilized more and more.
In a way, it boils down to the technical definition of "veto" in the sense of *one* party being able to say no, instead of deciding by majority vote.
After WWII in Europe there was a strong need for unification, and while everyone agreed on principle, no state wanted to give up its veto power. The result were institutions like Council of Europe (don't confuse with European Council and Council of European Union - we are great at naming things here) which is like UN, but on European level, and very much like UN it can't do much, because of the veto.
The breakthrough came only with European Coal and Steel Community, where some of the member state sovereignty was deletegated to the organization and later on as voting with veto was being gradually replaced by deciding by qualified majority.
But, at the same time, there's still lot of power being exercised by member states (subsidiarity principle, council of ministers, veto is some areas) which prevents EU from becoming a superstate where a minority could be oppressed by the majority.
Another way to look at it is what Robinson & Acemoglu describe in their book "The Narrow Corridor". What they say is that we get "liberty" only if the power of state is in balance with the pover of society. (By society they mean all the sub-state interest groups such as NGOs, regions, trade unions, religious confessions, organized crime, you name it.)
If state is stronger that society what you get is China. Society can't do anything and CPC bulldozes it over whenever it wants. If society is stronger than state what you get is Democratic Republic of Congo. The state doesn't even control parts of its territory, much less the more subtle issues like taxation or public services. (Picture: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJS1iUWWkAA-pQX.jpg)
Maybe it's stating the obvious, but in R&A view, the US is erring in the latter, not the former way.
In technical sense, I think, there are two mechanisms needed to keep the balance.
First, a mechanism to choose the solution in presence of disagreement. This could be majority voting in parliament, national referendums, as in Switzerland, or similar.
However, this should be only an incentive to engage in negotiaton and not to drag it on forever. Basically, a threat: If you can't negotiate a nice positive-sum solution, the matter will be decided by formal procedure and likely leave the both parties worse off.
Therefore, the second mechanism is needed: A dispute resolution procedure. A way to get the relevant interest groups to the negotiating table and a procedure to favorize those willing to agree on a compromise over those at the extremes. (An example of such depolarizing measure is collegiality principle: The deciding group is made of representatives of all parties, yet the group speaks with one voice. Once the decision is made, everybody must back it.)
There's been general acceptance within society that referendum is the defining, final procedure. The losing groups -- generally Republicans -- have done their best to fight that, though, and remain in power despite losing the popular vote.
The traditional model for getting around this is rights, especially ones that smell like property rights.
Actual private property is the simple case. In libertopia Dr. Nozick has an unvetoable right to build a rollercoaster in his back yard. The blast radius is limited by the size of his yard (and more realistically, can common law ideas like nuisance).
Governments too had domains where they held rights. These domains did overlap a bit to give us checks and balances but the US Constitution lays out a fairly limited and legible amount of this.
The modern administrative state intrudes into private rights in detail. Government power also has been pushed down to a plethora of agencies each with the power to veto each other and the public.
More authoritarian countries have produced a relatively veti-proof administrative state.
>"Well, you could decrease the number of veto points. But anyone who tried that would encounter two problems. First, it would be career suicide - when something bad inevitably happened, they would be on the hook for failing to prevent it - and no credit they got for all the cool things they were able to build would be able to save them."
You're being far too pessimistic here. There have been many modern examples of "veto" power being reduced or removed. The result, mainly, is that the general public is unaware of these arcane procedural details, and it bears little to no impact on the larger narratives of "success" or "failure".
A few to start with:
-Removal of the filibuster for Judicial nominees in 2013
-The increased use of "acting" cabinet appointments during the Trump admin
-The recent increased use of executive orders
-The introduction of reconciliation in the 1980s in order to circumvent the filibuster
Just to name a few off the top of my head. These all seem fine and good, with no public backlash (and little public awareness). We can reduce the vetocracy, so long as we have the political willpower to do so.
The more salient problem, as you hint at, is that there are ideologies in the U.S. who rather like it this way. Everybody ranks "legislature does thing I like=good, legislature does thing I don't like=bad" in the same way. But the asymmetry here is that one ideology also ranks "legislature does nothing at all = good", which changes the whole game. In a vetoless system, this ideological group may win half the time, but in a legislative vetocracy it's always winning.
It's understandable that people worry about things changing to worse. However, in theory, we could run a prototype on a small scale, prove that it is working well and then expand once trust is built. The problem is when we are polarized we cannot agree on our evaluation of prototypes' success. Like, a person initially praising Romneycare doesn't extend the same praise to Obamacare. (I've even seen more than one person praising ACA while bashing Obamacare.)
In theory, it seems like you could also instate bans on bans. Imagine, for example, a city that outlawed zoning regulations - beyond just not having any, it actively legislated against such regulations.
If veto powers are a sort of political resource that gets handed out to various interest groups, why don’t we also see “veto vetos” handed out in a similar way? Why isn’t the right to do X as vigorously defended as the right to complain about X?
Well, it is actually. Gun laws get huge pushback from conservatives, who vigorously defend their right to bear arms. We have a right to own property, a right to vote, a right to take pictures of people in public, a right to speak (although I admit it’s under attack, but then again when hasn’t it been?). It seems to me we’ve tended to diminish punitive sentencing over time, expand rights, roll back the war on drugs.
It’s not obvious to me that we exist in a vetocracy, except of course in the arenas of politics that are vetocracies.
Imagine that political/economic life was divided into lots of different independent segments, and they randomly morphed into varying levels of freedom vs restriction over time.
We’d then wind up with a few that are one or even two standard deviations in the “over-restricted” direction. Assuming they were all important, we’d notice these areas and be pissed about it. Likewise with areas that were under-regulated. The middle ground maybe we wouldn’t notice: the food industry seems to get things about right, along with most other consumer goods.
So how can I tell the difference between an over- and under-regulated society *in general*? Because if the underlying model is that asymmetric justice and inaction bias tend to produce over-regulation, we ought to verify this by seeing a general trend in society as a whole. Not just be able to cherry pick areas of the economy that seem catastrophically over-regulated. I’d expect that to happen just by “regulatory drift.”
Yes, in Switzerland everybody group or actor, however small, has a say. One would expect that to lead to a blocked decision making process. However, the institution of referendum acts as an anti-festering measure. If the participants can't agree on a nice positive-sum compromise, the issue will be eventually solved by simple majority voting in a referendum. And given that the result of the referendum is uncertain and that the solution is probably not going to be exactly what the most actors would be happy with, there's an actual pressure to make a compromise.
I realise you probably weren't very serious, but the scientific consensus is that cold fusion is straight up impossible. Our Standard Model of particle physics does not allow for it.
Maybe use "commercially viable fusion" instead? Or de novo protein folding or something similar?
I think it's a bit misleading to say "But Congress was able to get by with [the filibuster] for decades, because everyone was polite and cooperative and didn't want to screw things up too badly."
There are two different things referred to as the "filibuster"! The filibuster in the original sense, the sort that required getting up and actually talking to hijack proceedings (the "talking filibuster"), and the "virtual filibuster" or "silent filibuster" that allows you to demand a 3/5 cloture vote even without having to get up and talk. IINM, the virtual filibuster was only introduced in 1975. Prior to that filibustering was a bit more costly. Although a talking filibuster could also be quite costly on the party *not* filibustering, as discussed here: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/02/filibusted.html . So I'm not advocating a return to the talking filibuster, or at least not the talking filibuster as it previously existed. (IMO it should be done away with entirely, but that's a separate matter -- point is if you want to bring back the talking filibuster you also have to fix the problems with it.)
Anyway, point is I'm skeptical that it makes sense to group these two together.
(Note also that the filibuster is purely a Senate phenomenon; the House has never had any filibuster.)
Take a hard vetocracy (e.g. France) vs a mild one (e.g. UK) vs democratically elected dictatorship (e.g. Germany)
Was this blog always soooo much about politics? And in such a US-centric pundit way? I don't remember that being the case.
Where's the data? This is a thing where numbers exist, compile them, compare them.
I miss albion seed style reviews...
Please, please, please don't let some weird hive mind substack mentality of publishing daily driver you towards only publishing things you can write in a day, or if you do, just write fiction.
I sometimes wonder if it would make sense for the government to buy out the interests of a veto group.
Let's imagine an example where the government would like to make it simpler for people to pay their taxes, but there's currently an entrenched industry selling people tax preparation assistance who will obviously lose out if this change is made, and they have enough political clout to block the change.
What if the government says: We realize it's kind of unfair to have your career ruined because of some dumb procedural change. So: Everyone who loses their job due to this change has a permanent guaranteed government job until retirement age. We'll try to find something useful for you to do (first idea: audits!), but even if we can't, we'll still pay you as compensation for destroying your other career.
And hey, we need some place for all these new government employees to work, so let's buy the buildings they already work in, at fair market price (or even slightly above). And we'll also buy their office equipment and any other notable sunk capital investments in the industry.
NOW, you have no reason to veto anymore, and society can go ahead and make this net-beneficial change that would otherwise be vetoed.
Obviously, this costs more (to the government) than just making the change and letting the current industry die. And if you actually had the ability to take that option, then that might be a valid objection. But we've already established that they can effectively veto you, so that option is illusory. (Lots of plans look bad when compared to theoretical alternatives that you can't actually take!)
The relevant comparison is how much it costs compared to the status quo. And since society as a whole is already SOMEHOW paying all of the salaries and capital returns of this whole industry (otherwise it would not exist), it's not obvious that there is any NET cost to paying them through the government instead.
Now, likely paying that rent PLUS the cost of implementing the new tax system will be more expensive. But most of the costs of implementing the new system are probably labor and equipment for the people doing the implementing, and look! we just acquired a bunch of labor and equipment of approximately the right type, for a cost that was already factored into this plan! I bet that offsets a pretty large fraction of the implementation costs of the legal change.
There is also the obvious problem that it's very hard (both politically and practically) to pay for this plan by capturing EXACTLY the money that society was already somehow paying to support this industry. In practice those costs will not be distributed quite the same way as before; SOMEONE will lose out and howl about it. But hopefully not an existing and well-coordinated lobbying group. And this particular veto is gone forever.
And as I am not an expert in ANY of the fields relevant to this proposal, it probably has huge problems that have not occurred to me, which might or might not be solvable.
One issue with any buy-out scheme is that nothing guarantees the rent seekers will stop seeking rent.
In fact, it just produces a new incentive to do so. Get good enough at rent-seeking, and society will buy you out! It’s a little like negotiating with terrorists. Yes, I am apparently comparing Turbo Tax to the Taliban.
It’s a similar problem to the perverse incentives of a safety net. Make enough bad decisions, and society will sponsor your rent and medical bills! I support a safety net, from a moral and economic perspective, but not rent-seeker buyouts. What gives?
The difference to me is that it makes sense to me (parable of the talents) that opportunity is not equally distributed and some people just get hammered with plain old bad luck right in the sweet spot of their economically productive phase of life. You probably do lose a fair amount of economic output when people are tilted away from self-sufficiency into dependency via the safety net, but oh well.
By contrast, corporate rent seekers are smart, hard workers. They know how the big system works and they exploit it in a big way. They could be doing a lot of good if their talents and drive were put to good use. So there should be zero tolerance for high-functioning rent seekers, and non-zero tolerance for low-functioning rent seekers.
Of course, this isn’t the actual world. The real picture is closer to the opposite. Our society quietly tolerates high functioning rent seekers, maybe not online, but where it really counts: at the dinner table. Too many of our friends and relations are deeply invested in one rent seeking industry or another; we’d rather let them pick our pockets than personally attack out friends and relations.
I imagine it’s a little like if you live in a country where the police take bribes. Even if you’re angry about it on one level, you get a whole lot more polite when your uncle the cop comes over for dinner. And not just because you’re scared of his power, but also because you love him.
I'm not sure it's a NEW incentive for rent-seeking--you're paying them the rent that they would have gotten anyway under the status quo. And in my proposal, they only keep the guaranteed salary if they work for the government, so we're not necessarily freeing up any new time for additional rent-seeking. (Plus, the government extracts some labor that would otherwise be spent defending the rent.)
Punishing high-functioning rent-seekers might still be a better option...but only if you can figure out a way to actually ENACT that option in the face of their veto.
Depending on the details of how they accomplish their veto, maybe you could punish a handful of the most egregious offenders while buying out everyone else?
I agree with this. Sorry, I missed your original comment – I have made a similar point less succinctly below. There is a literature in various fields on effectively buying out veto players, which does not seem to be very well known.
And, sorry, one other point is that I think many humans react negatively to a "buy out the rentiers" framing, perhaps because it feels like caving in to a bully: I have found it easier to frame such deals as "share the benefits of fixing the deadweight losses".
My concern is that this arrangement would last more (or possibly much less!) as long as the current group of people the government bought out were working.
It's easy for me to imagine scenarios like the following:
* Unholy alliances of business/lobbyists/politicians break government on purpose to create unnecessary industries, then get guaranteed government jobs for life when the government eventually buys them out.
* Nothing but a changeable "policy" and voters hold back politicians a few years in the future from re-breaking the government to necessitate the industry that just got bought out. If they were able to get away with breaking it in the first place, how confident do we feel that they won't get away with doing it a second time?
* If the buy-out was protected with some sort of iron-clad change, perhaps at the constitutional level, then it hamstrings our flexibility if the government should turn out to do a terrible job.
I'm not sure how to deal with these three objections. So I'd prefer to push against parasite industries through the normal political process, accepting that it's a genuine tradeoff.
I think it's a valid concern but I think it's very hard to think about these questions in the abstract. There are known tools and techniques in the fields of policy analysis and policy studies to create policies that constrain re-breakings of the kind of that you suggest, but I think it's hard to discuss them without looking at specific concrete examples of broken sectors. (I give some references in my main comment.)
This is a well-studied phenomenon in public choice economics. Any economically and politically powerful special interests groups grow over time until the stifle any political progress and change. It's a one-way street of increasing institutional entrenchment.
As a proof, you could look towards any high potential country with an educated, healthy, law-abiding workforce, decimate their government and rebuild it from scratch, and you would see huge social development and economic growth. In the Rise and Decline of Nations, Mancur Olson (a left-wing economist) notes that we have a natural experiment in the form of post-WW2 Japan and Germany, both which underwent the treatment and saw what are generally known as "economic miracles", becoming some of the largest economies in the world.
Incidentally, this is exactly what's happening to the technology industry as we speak. Economic theories of industry lifecycles dictate that each industry undergoes a period of initial growth, increasing maturity and regulation, and then stagnation - standard textbook stuff. The Internet was basically an unregulated anarchist paradise where everyone could do whatever they wanted, followed by immense growth of a few companies. Now special interests such as media and government longingly look at all the economic and political power these companies wield, create a moral panic from the mostly made-up, although somewhat real social ills caused by these companies to regulate the industry. New company formation, innovation and economic growth are all already tapering out and will soon cease just as they have in other industries.
I agree that public choice economics has been addressing this issue and warning us of stagnation and sclerosis for decades now. Mancur Olson (Rise and Decline) and Joseph Tainter (The Collapse of Complex Societies) have also been especially insightful.
Over time, organizations and societies become cluttered with rules, bureaucracies, legacy systems, and rent seeking coalitions. This is further complicated by the problem of declining marginal returns. In empires this leads eventually to collapse.
The solutions, imperfect at best, are constructive competition between organizations (federalism), exit options and rights, creative destruction, and new colonies or spin offs.
Public choice economics is tendentious and somewhat dishonest.
There's an obvious way out of the path: voting. Specifically, the Swiss-style simple majority referendum. The *lack* of this -- that's what causes all the problems. If we could bypass the veto points created by things like the malapportioned Senate, we would not have serious problems.
"labor unions forcing terms on companies - all of these are examples of good people trying to prevent bad things in ways that introduce more veto points."
You could resolve this problem by having labour in control of the means of production. This way capitalist would not be able to veto them.
Lets say you have a company that makes both shoes and socks. The 60% of employees on the shoe side decide that the company should move to making just shoes, so vote to fire the people on the sock side. That analogous to cases in politics people are concerned about for "tyranny of majority", and the justification for having veto points, etc. (I'm assuming that "labour controlling the means of production" means some sort of cooperative model here).
Yes, that's true. Not only will the proletariat be given absolute power, the capitalist class will no longer exist as a category. This is similar to how we solved the problem of slavery. Eventually you have to get rid of slave-holders as a class.
My point as been entirely missed. (My fault; I was rather oblique.)
Your proposal has no hope of generalizing to the many, many other examples of vetocracy, because "pick one faction and give them 100% of the power" is not a remotely acceptable solution in MOST contexts. So insofar as this addresses vetocracy at all, it only addresses one tiny special case of it.
And even within the context of that tiny special case, this is a preposterous solution. Not because it wouldn't work, or even because it would be a bad idea, but because it is wildly disproportionate to the problem under discussion.
It's like suggesting we could cure someone's acne through mind uploading. Mind uploading could, in fact, cure your acne, and perhaps there's a case to be made for mind uploading *as a policy*...but if you made a list of the best arguments, "it would cure your acne" would not be in the top hundred. It would be utterly ridiculous for someone's position on mind uploading to be swayed by an argument about how it would cure acne.
It would be similarly ridiculous for someone's opinion on Marxist revolutions to be swayed by "it would solve one tiny special case of vetocracy".
This makes it look like you don't actually care about vetocracy, and just want an excuse to trot out your hobby horse.
This is a strawman argument. I never claimed it would solve all problems of "vetocracy" - rather that it is the only solution to the class struggle between capital and labour.
One does have to prohibit attempts to interfere with the voting by preventing people from voting, refusing to count the votes, trying to stop the election entirely,... such as Republicans try to do routinely
I live in New Zealand. Our national government can do whatever the hell it likes and has zero veto points other than a desire to get re-elected every 3 years. There is no constitution, when the courts rule they have done something illegal they can just ignore it, they routinely interfere with local government on a fundamental level, there is no upper house, there is no presidential veto (de facto).
New Zealand also has an acute case of can't-build-anything-itis. The most serious crisis here at the moment isn't covid, it's a major shortfall of houses and extreme price rises (especially considering our low population density). It does not end there as major infrastructure projects have virtually ground to a halt over the last 30 years.
Neoliberalism is strongest in the Anglo countries and I'd advise looking there for comparisons first. Ideology is what is keeping politicians from doing stuff.
This gets more directly to what I was thinking when I posted about whether the shrinking size of the federal government in terms of employment might mean for getting things done.
Ideologically, the federal government ceased somewhere around Reagan to be seen as a force for good, big, useful projects.
I don't know that it is true that infrastructure projects have "virtually ground to a halt". We're building new wind farms, for example, and the Waikato Expressway should be complete late this year. Looking at the NZTA web site, I see plenty of other roading work underway around the country.
Perhaps I'm just not thinking big enough. Can you give an example of one or two major infrastructure projects that you think we should be doing now but aren't?
Has the national government actually tried to, e.g. build more houses in a specific city, and actually made as much progress as, even deciding what exact properties they'd seize by eminent domain?
I predict not – but I'm not that confident and I'm curious too!
No idea. Perhaps there aren't enough trained builders?
The original claim is close enough to true. In extreme cases, Parliament might intervene - as happened in Britain recently - but that would be extremely unusual. Our government isn't usually that sociopathic anyway.
I think treating this as a consequence of polarization is wrong. Conservatives want less checks, Democrats more. 2-out-1-in regulatory approaches are very popular with right wing governments around the world. Boris Johnson implemented simplified zoning and planning laws. Not saying there aren't drawbacks, but if you're looking to deregulate you clearly have more allies on the right.
I should say right-wingers in the US. In Europe and the UK some of the right-wingers are more legitimate. In the US, right-wingers have just been flat-out liars since Reagan, or perhaps Nixon.
The most surprising thing is that people often seem to neglect the non-zero-sum nature of many of these problems, and how much potentially easier that should make it to solve them.
A sector with a huge deadweight loss is often an opportunity to create large amounts of value and share that value with enough of the veto players to get reform through – see e.g. Michael Trebilcock's work on transitional gains traps –
One of Trebilcock's key points is that just making the veto player's entitlements tradeable (alienable) can sometimes help to reduce or eliminate the deadweight loss.
The space of policy options is almost infinitely dimensioned so it should very often be possible to assemble a bundle of policies that will unite a winning coalition for change (see William Riker's "heresthetic", and pp. 61-65 of this https://www.macmillanihe.com/page/detail/Rational-Choice/?K=9781137427410).
To some extent the rise in veto points may be an aspect of Demsetz's points about increasing demand for protection against externalities as technology increases: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1821637?seq=1
As you have pointed out there are other sectors like education and healthcare which plausibly seem to have enormous deadweight losses. Government has grown massively in extent and complexity but we have not yet evolved good institutions to find sectors of large deadweight losses and seek to improve regulations on an as near to win-win basis as possible.
There arguments why it may be hard for government to fix those, relating for example to credible commitment problems, which I summarize in that Mercatus piece above [from Lee J. Alston and Bernardo Mueller, “Property Rights and the State,” in Handbook of New Institutional Economics, ed. Claude Ménard and Mary M. Shirley (Berlin: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2008), 573–90] but I don't think those are insurmountable.
The current political political players may be acting entirely rationally – their support base may make it difficult for them to frame issues as non-zero-sum, for example – but that doesn't mean that others outside the system e.g. EA or Progress Studies people could not make headway by designing policies that will help to create a new Schelling point around which a coalition can form. I think it would be good if these techniques were more widely known within those movements.
Oh, these are all really good points. It reminds me of Hernando de Soto's work which, boiled down to a blog post comment is 'give people titles or deeds to their shantytown shacks'.
I often think that that might be a good way to 'fix' car parking rules (i.e. mostly get rid of the common mandatory minimums here in the U.S.). Street parking tho is a little hard to hand out titles too – maybe a simple lottery of registered voters or some other kind of official list of residents.
Some "veto player's entitlements" are much more nebulous than others – there's often not a clear enough delineation of which piece of the overall entitlement 'belongs' to which individuals, but who has the entitlement at all (or to what degree).
And of course the handing out of the entitlements is yet another thing which itself can be vetoed!
That's a bit of the rub with a lot of this otherwise cool research. In the end, any implementation is just politics too. There's no escape!
In parking reform, Professor Donald Shoup's ideas can also be seen as a way to buy out the incumbent veto players – the fact that they are not framed that way has made it easier for them to be adopted in various places. If designed well the formalisation of the entitlements won't make anyone worse off, so it is simply a question of ensuring that objections stemming from non-economic concerns are not aroused. https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated-ebook/dp/B08R2CQX79/
When the veto player's desire is some combination of white supremacy, patriarchy/misogyny, and personal power, there's no deal to be made with them. They're either not rational or so focused on personal power for the purposes of abuse that there's nothing reasonable to be done with them. You can't buy them out because they don't want money; they want things you can't compromise on.
Increasing risk-aversion among individuals is another big factor to throw in.
i.e. it feels to me that people have become more risk-averse over the last few decades. We (on average) care more about being safe from bad things than on creating good things.
If that's the case (presumably data exists somewhere), then the vetocracy would just be giving the people what they want.
There might still be ways to square the circle. The LW crowd seem even more risk-averse than the general population, but still keen on making big projects happen. I'm just not sure where the secret sauce is in that.
First, I think there's a massive conflation that Ezra has been making on vetocracy Vs polarisation and that's a big reason his thesis doesn't really hold up once you add a) all the other issues that were polarising us before but aren't now like religion, b) the issues that are central to identity but aren't polarising, and c) international political Polarisation in other countries which have also seen rise in far right movements. This was my biggest issue with Why We're Polarised too, as I'd written in my strange loop canon commentary.
Secondly, the vetocracy issue is a feature of the system. We have democratic rulemaking, a (sensible) worry about negative events and a bias for action. Which means we can only keep adding new rules rather than remove them. There's no incentive to not be NIMBY other than "being a good citizen", but that's not nearly strong enough to overcome this collective action problem. All decisions have tradeoffs, and if we're solely focused on win-win decisioning hen of course we'll get stuck in a local minima.
It's also a self fulfilling prophecy, because if I thought the construction of a high speed rail was great, but it will take fifteen years, I wouldn't want it near my house either.
My preferred solution is to introduce more negative veto points, like a benevolent czar who's been appointed, to power through by not needing to make every decision subject to individual veto - focus on exit instead of voice in Hirschman's parlance. But even that won't work for things like NY rail. We should also be using wayyyy more sunset provisions in our bills, to reduce the regulatory quagmire. They won't solve the problem of making people want to build extra housing and reduce their property values, but that too we can solve with more infrastructure (schools, amenities, transport links) etc.
So to me there are 3 attack vectors
1. Make decision making easier - a bit more benevolent dictatorship
2. Reduce the number of roadblocks - sunset provisions in law, killing bills, reducing regulatory complexity, an empowered agency to curtail the other agencies?
3. Technology - if making a railway took 1 year instead of 15, just might make things happen faster.
There's a book called, "American Nations," by someone named Colin Woodard. He actually wrote about this issue a little bit in his book, but the basic gist is that at the time the constitution was widely adopted by the colonies and was expanding to territories in the early 19th century, it was geared towards giving distinct ethnic/cultural groups specific veto powers in order to induce them to join the union. Basically, puritans were thrown done bones, the dutch were thrown some bones, Southerners were thrown some bones, the Germans, the Quakers, etc. The reality is that these groups don't naturally get along, or really trust each other, which means that a political coalition among them would be tenuous at best. In the early days of the federal government, land was plentiful and population density was exceptionally low. Now, the various cultures are geographically intermixed and population density has increased dramatically since then. Thus, it shouldn't be surprising that political entities at all levels have created new veto points since that was and is what basically keeps the population from separating. Essentially, veto power exists to defer dealing with the problem of cultural disassociation and the consequent dissolution of the union.
I don't buy the premise about what the US could be doing. It also could be doing much worse. Does Ezra read the tweets of the people that happen to get into positions of power?
So the richer society => more status quo bias seems reasonable to me. But I also think it’s a function of an aging (and even older electorate) creates a status quo bias. Our politicians themselves are also super old (partly reflecting the electorate, partly pay often sucks vs alternatives so it’s an end of career activity, electorate doesn’t like change so name recognition wins?). I find myself less interested in new slightly more optimized ways to do things as I get older.
The build more housing crowd for example is mostly young people who see their generation unable to afford houses. If the country’s demographics were younger they would have more clout. Granted thinking about “when did TFP slow down” doesn’t line up neatly with baby boomers aging, so that makes me a little less confident in the thesis.
The first step should be moving to a loser pays legal system. I was just reading about a wind turbine proposal and how all the local busy bodies filed lawsuits to stop it. Now these are upper middle class people who can spend $25k on a lawyer to file a frivolous lawsuit. But if they faced the prospect of losing their house if they lost the case and had to pay the oppositions legal bills, we’d have a lot fewer lawsuits.
In reading about how the cost to build rail, roads, wind turbines, power plants etc are vastly higher in the US than in other advanced countries one of the major factors is the cost of litigation.
Perhaps the opposite! Right now, poor people have to pay their own way through the court system even if they are unequivocally on the correct side of the law. In a loser-pays system, poor people could at least afford to fight winnable cases more often.
Right now lawyers take winnable cases on contingency. Presumably lawyers would need to be 99% sure they will win vs the current 95% if they knew that losing would mean no money for them and paying the opposite sides legal fees.
Right now the only thing a lawyer risks taking a case on contingency is his time.
His time, and his staff's time, which he has to pay for even if they lose, and rent on the law offices that were put to such ultimately unproductive use, etc. So we know that successful law firms have pockets deep enough to cover reasonable legal expenses for a lost case, and since I don't think most law firms go out of business if they lose two cases in a row, they should be able to cover both side's reasonable legal expenses in one case.
Long term, if you're taking cases where you're even 51% likely to win, "We win, we get a reasonable judgement and reasonable legal fees, we lose and we pay the other side's reasonable fees" has a better expected return than "if we win, we have to cover our own fees out of the reasonable judgement". If the short-term variability is a problem, that's what insurance is for and lawsuit insurance could certainly be a thing (already sometimes of is, on the defense side).
There's lots of ways for friction to creep into the system, so you'd need to set your threshold higher than 51% to make a long-term profit. And so there's lots of fun and interesting questions in how to set up the system to minimize that friction. But "poor people and their contingency-fee lawyers couldn't afford the risk" isn't a reason to roundfile the idea on principle.
I think a part of the problem is that congress is broken. Lots of reasons for this... talked about many places. The major problem is tribalism. No one wants to help the other side get something done. I'm constantly reminded of "Death Throws of the Republic" the series of history podcasts from Dan Carlin. We are at a point where party matters more than country. My short term solution is to vote for candidates who are veterans. (they have shown some signs of putting country first... I know shades of "Starship Troopers" by RAH.) Long term I hope for a third party, that can maybe force congress to take back it's power and do it's job. (Third parties seem to be losing power though... sigh)
Justin Amash has tweeted repeatedly about the concentration of power in the US Congress to a few leaders. Compromise and bi-partisan efforts have a higher hurdle to clear than before the rules changed to give the leaders their power. Partisanship is now structural and probably why the legislative is largely theater and the executive rules by fiat.
The major problem is quite simply the malapportioned US Senate, which allows a small minority of the population (who can be manipulated easily by buying up rural radio and TV stations) to veto everything.
Since I agree with Steven Pinker that the world has been quite drastically improving each and every decade for a long time, I fail to see the riddle.
The systems we have are much better than the system that we had 50 years ago. If we want to improve them, then this is naturally harder. Regulations are part of this.
It was very easy to build a crappy car 50 years ago and sell it. If the brakes failed, then the people die, and you shrugged it off because people died all the time from car accidents. Today, people don't die anymore. Approximately zero people die from car accidents. This is actually a pretty precise approximation when you compare with 1970. So nowadays, when you want to build a car, you need to meet the requirement that brakes must not fail. It's not just a recommendation, there is actually a regulation that ensures this. But even without regulation, it is just much harder to build a car that meets the high standards of other car companies.
The same also holds for institutions. They are incredibly much better than 50 years ago. Look at mental asylums now and then. Schools. Hospitals. Do you really want to be treated in a hospital with 1970 standards, even if they had access to modern drugs?
But that means that changing them for the better is harder now. Not because someone wants to prevent you from doing things, but just because of diminishing returns. I like to picture it as an energy landscape -- the deeper you are in a sink, the further you need to move to find an even better one.
In my eyes, the increasing amount of regulations are symptom, because they (should) basically encode all the directions in which you will make things worse. Of course, they are a proxy, and can go wrong. And sometimes the overall level of regulation is not right, so that we have over- or underregulation. So we should put effort into making the right regulations, and the right amount.
But in principle, if we live in an improving world, we should expect the number of regulations go up.
> In 2010, there were an estimated 5,419,000 crashes, 30,296 deadly, killing 32,999, and injuring 2,239,000.
They are, inevitably, incredibly dangerous to operate or even be near (when in operation). We _could_ make cars (and similar vehicles) much safer – see road rally cars for an 'existence proof' – but approximately no one would accept the hassle required to reach that level of safety.
Interesting. For Germany, it's absolutely true. The number of traffic fatalities peaked around 1970 (21,000), and decreased to 3,000 in 2019. (For comparison, 3000 = Covid death toll of 3 days at peak.) And since 1970, the number of people grew from 60 Mio to 80 Mio, and the number of cars tripled. So the number of deaths per 100,00 cars went down from 100 to 5. That is very close to zero when you start from 100.
The numbers for the US are perhaps a bit less impressive. The number of fatalities per population (or per car) is 3 times higher than in Germany. And Germany ranks only in the middle in Europe.
I think part of the problem is that vetos are so easy to exercise, and many are even automatic (in the form of prohibitive fixed costs). I wonder if there's a consistent way to make vetos themselves more costly, so that they are deployed to prevent atrocities but not out of casual spite or signalling.
Maybe things like 'you have to run an environmental impact proposal before building IF someone submits a petition with 1000 local signatures requesting it within 1 month of announcing the build' or 'Every Senator gets to filibuster exactly once during their Senate career, after that they may be removed from the floor if they try it again.'
I imagine that the problems which cause vetocracy will find ways to route around these restrictions, of course. But maybe an attitude that favors theses types of common-sense restrictions on the power of vetoes would be able to gain enough support to actively fight those forces over the long term, where the attitude that says 'no regulations ever don't tread on me taxation is theft' fails to capture public support.
What I see happening in The Netherlands is a really weird dynamic where laws are adopted that have significant consequences, but these get passed with very little opposition by politicians, nor very much debate. Subsequently, the executive tries really hard to not follow the law, by coming up with all kinds of loopholes or cheats, but this seems to often be supported by a majority of the legislative. It can't be explained by checks and balances, when politicians refuse to back the laws they passed themselves.
I think that the Dutch legislative branch is fundamentally broken. It certainly operates very differently from the past in objectively measurable ways. For example, the tour of duty of the Dutch House of Representatives (which leads in lawmaking) has declined immensely, to 6 years. Half of them last only 4 years, which is a single term. So the level of experience is appalling and the incentives to pass a law that promises the moon, but at enormous costs to other important things, or to not fix structural problems that require unpopular solutions, are immense.
They've adopted new rules that allow a smaller group of legislators to call for an emergency session, which rapidly got abused so it takes month before an emergency session can be scheduled. Recently, even the media has started complaining about their own short term focus, where they have a symbiosis with politicians who proudly go on TV to explain how horrible the latest incident is and who make all kinds of hollow promises, only to make the exact opposite promises for the next incident, when that incident is blamed on the opposite problem.
I think that something broke politics and that it probably has something to do with how politicians get treated, changing their incentives from choosing a long term career as a politician and to take ownership of problems, to far more short term oriented behavior.
I'm not convinced that an increase in Nimbyism is the cause, because my country has done it's best to make it very hard to go against the government. Basically, only professionally organized NGOs tend to have a chance. Yet that legislation doesn't seem to have had a significant positive effect. Many problems aren't even at the level where veto's can work. For example, government IT problems are a major cause of making it impossible to do things, which are often to blame on completely unreasonable demands by legislators & the executive, who demand an unreasonable level of complexity from such systems (and change their demands along the way). No citizen gets a veto over such IT projects, nor are there environmental laws in play.
It may be helpful to see constitutional democracy as a peaceful alternative to civil war.
When civil war is a risk or a reality, a common approach is to match institutional vetoes to major players ("potential spoilers") at that time. The key is to give major players (defined as those who could throw everyone into civil war) some payoff to stay peaceful, and a veto so that their payoff can't be taken away. In theory, this means that major players will (a) prefer peace to civil war, (b) be protected from one another, and (c) see changes to the status quo as consensual. ABC segment gets privileged access to tax dollars; DEF gets licenses to extract natural resources; XYZ gets recognition for some other property rights. My co-author Michael and I call this the "chronic challenge."
One problem is that the status quo changes on its own. Oil prices fall. The economy goes into a recession. Demographic change happens. A once powerful segment loses an iconic leader, and falls into division. If a new major player doesn't have a stake in the system, and a veto to protect itself, it may throw the system into civil war. Particularly, if a once major player has lost size or status, but still reaps disproportionate gains. We call this the "constitutive challenge."
Now layer in the opportunities to "build", to solve problems in an agile, adaptive way in the near term. The structures that protect us from one another can impede our ability to respond gracefully to the environment. We call this the "acute challenge."
So we have three different time scales of action, putting different demands on the system:
- Near term: we want agility to solve problems ("the acute challenge")
- Medium term: we need major players to have a stake in the system ("the chronic challenge")
- Long term: we need to gracefully reallocate vetoes as power + identity of major players shifts ("constitutive challenge")
It's a lot.
In theory, a constrained executive + a collaborative legislature can walk the line here. In practice, it's not so simple. We are witnessing the breakdown of that theory.
Veto-based systems can tip into brinkmanship and other ugly bargaining behaviors. Or delegate their authority to the executive when they control it. The executive, in turn, can use their power to act unilaterally to loosen the constraints on them.
There are better ways to build trust being opposing elites.
I would go on, but my 6 yo is wanting me to play tag.
I feel like a lot of this discussion is too abstract. What specifically should we be building? Why aren't we? And what can we do?
1: Housing: Zoning laws set up perverse incentives. The only people who seem to have any say is the people who stand to lose something. The people who would like to buy more housing and move in don't get a say. It's easy to say zoning should be more permissive, but it's unclear how to actually convince NIMBY communities to allow this.
2: Energy infrastructure: It's unclear to me that there is actually a problem? We already have a cheap source of energy. It's hard to displace that without making new renewable energy not just cheaper, but so cheap that's it's actually worthwhile to uproot the current system.
3: COVID tests: That was a unique technical screw up, not an incentive or a veto problem, and the problem has been more than solved for months. We have more tests than states are using.
4: Ventilators, PPE: These problems have been solved for months. If anything these are a testament to our current economic strength. I doubt that an America in the 1980s could have solved an acute ventilator shortage in mere months. And it's difficult to build a system that would already have enough ventilators on hand. Equipment that is not being used is a waste - it takes up storage space, it needs to be maintained, money spent on it could have been better invested elsewhere.
5: ICU beds: This is a genuinely difficult problem because ICU beds (and all of the respiratory therapist, nursing, sanitation, physician, technician and pharmacist staffing that goes along with it), is really freaking expensive. We could lower barriers to entry in all of those professions. Get rid of the bachelors degree as a requirement for more specialized fields.
7: Flying cars and supersonic flight: Is that a joke? They are too expensive - so the demand is insufficient to justify investment. The Concord failed because they weren't profitable. They would have eventually withered away even if it weren't for the infamous crash. Not a veto problem.
With respect to ventilators, I think that it is not really a case of the nation's being able or unable to marshal the resources to build them. Perhaps it could have, but it turned out that they weren't actually needed. The experts who were using or planning to use the power of the federal government in a way of which Ezra Klein would presumably have approved to acquire needed ventilators got it wrong. ICU bed shortages were rare, highly localized, very temporary and had (as near as I can tell) a very minor impact on fatalities. The US had ample capacity to build COVID tests. The regulators wouldn't let that capacity be used until their own failures to produce a test became manifest. When we carefully examine Klein's specific examples of failure circa April 2020 they are all either, as you say, "a joke" or simply wrong. So why spend a bunch of effort trying to fix a problem we can't prove to a reasonable certainty actually exists?
When people are optimistic about the future, they try to make that future a reality by building. When people are pessimistic about the future, they try to prevent that future from becoming reality by clinging to the past. I think a lot of the political will for exercising veto power is rooted in America's growing pessimism about the future.
I've been reading a lot of classic science fiction from the 1940s - 1960s recently. The optimism jumps off the page. Most of it's not utopian -- there are still lots of challenges -- but they're still confident about progress.
Contrast that with a scenario that played out this fall in the small town of 30,000 where I live in the Shenandoah Valley. This town has a lot of late 19th / early 20th century homes and buildings near the downtown core. They're mostly Queen Anne Victorian's with some facsimile's of continental European styles thrown in. Some are kept up nicely, others aren't (more on that in a bit).
The old county courthouse is a kind of neo-classical mishmash (I'm not an architectural historian -- it's got Corinthian columns, a dome, and a brick facade). The county says it needs to expand the courthouse and proposed a plan to the city to build an ugly 5-story neoclassical mishmash of Corinthian columns, a brick facade, and glass, adjacent to the existing courthouse. Some old, tiny office buildings that used to be used by the "barristers" would have been torn down.
Almost overnight "Save Our Downtown!" yard signs started popping up all over town. There was a huge public outcry. How could they build this eyesore in the middle of our lovely downtown?!?! We have to preserve historical character of our city!
The historical preservation commission rejected the plan. Who knows what'll happen next.
This isn't about protecting the environment or helping the poor and the vulnerable. This is about the aesthetic preferences of a bunch of upper middle class people who are quite happy that the townsfolk of 150-100 years ago experimented with a range of eclectic styles that were considered modern at the time, but who decided to put an end to those experiments circa 1970 and now want to live in a museum rather than a vibrant, growing, risk-taking city.
That's the exact opposite of helping the poor and the vulnerable. The Victorian houses that aren't in good condition stay that way because the historical preservation commission makes renovations too expensive for anyone not in the upper middle class, while also making it impossible to tear them down and build something new and affordable.
It's a petty tyranny of people who think our best days are behind us. That's how I've experienced vetocracy.
But the real tragedy is that younger generations who would normally push back against this mindset and carry society into the future, kicking and screaming if necessary, *also* are convinced America's best days are behind it. I can't *totally* blame them -- they were told that as long as they went to college they would be successful, but also that they could do and be anything they wanted. So a whole lot of people amassed a whole lot of debt getting degrees that weren't that valuable, and then they got out into the real world and decided the future wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Unfortunately, their way of fixing things is just a return to the failed ideas of the past.
Ross Douthat's book "The Decadent Society" captures this nicely, albeit through the lens of his Catholic moral sensibilities.
Maybe it's inevitable that institutions and societies become sclerotic once they reach a certain level of comfort, and then the sclerosis leads to slower growth, which leads to pessimism about the future, which leads people to pine after a mythical Golden Age, which leads to more sclerosis, which leads to...
I actually *am* optimistic about the future. There is so, so much potential for huge improvements in material, social, emotional, and psychological well being in my lifetime. But I'll admit that the rut that polarization, or vetocracy, or decadence, or whatever you want to call it gets me down sometimes, especially over the last year. And I'm really concerned that neither America nor any other western-style democracy will be the leaders of the major advances of the next century, and that makes it even harder to be optimistic, because the current alternative seems to be places governed by authoritarians that trample over individual rights in service of their definition of the collective good.
I still think we can break out of it, though it might take a good solid kick in the ass (COVID?). But It takes a deliberate effort to remain optimistic these days. Which is all the more reason to stop building copies of 18th and 19th century buildings!
The point about the change in science fiction is interesting. I stopped reading new science fiction maybe twenty years ago precisely because it had all gotten too depressing for my tastes, and more recently I watched the new Star Trek Picard series and was struck by the change from a basically utopian to a basically dystopian view of the future. The latest season of Discovery was pretty bad too. (Compare this 2013 description https://www.egscomics.com/comic/2013-01-16 from El Goonish Shive.)
I had been thinking of it as a change in fashion, but perhaps it really does reflect a more pessimistic view of the future from society in general?
(On the other hand, Star Wars seems about the same as ever.)
I think modern Star Trek and Star Wars are two sides of the same pessimistic coin. Dystopia for the nihilists, nostalgia for the escapists.
Picard might be a fusion of both (I didn't watch it, so I'll have to take your word that's dystopian). I mean, it's bringing back characters from 30 years ago!
Your observation about new science fiction taking a turn around 20 years ago is interesting. That's about the time I remember "dark" and "gritty" movies and TV becoming popular, supposedly because they were more serious, mature, and realistic. For a while I thought it was a reaction to 9/11 and the Bush years, but now I'm thinking the roots run deeper.
(Anyone that watched Babylon 5 will know that you can take a more realistic view of the future without being dark)
I agree with your impression of science fiction, that it turned from optimism to pessimism. Out of curiosity, I popped over to a science fiction forum to see if they've ever discussed it, and they have: https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/578886/
Turns out some sci fi nerds agree with the impression, but others disagree. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know who's right.
One issue I have with this is you seem to be regarding "the government" at too high a level. At least in the US there is a fundamental and structurally intended difference between the branch of the government that generates regulations pursuant to validly passed statutes (e.g. the executive branch) and the branch that enacts the statutes (e.g. the legislative branch). For a variety of historical reasons the structural veto points in our system are at the legislative level and not in the executive branch. This would help explain why you get ever increasing use of regulatory powers while simultaneously not being able to pass new laws. Also because the Executive is less constrained and is incentivized to actually try and get things done for the electorate they constantly push their powers towards the practical and theoretical limit.
I'm not sure the conclusions you draw from Ezra are the same conclusions he draws. You seem to suggest that since our institutions are failing, we need to find a way to work around these failing institutions, since they are destined to fail. Ezra, on the other hand, argues that our institutions are failing because they are configured in such a way that leads them to fail. While compromise use to be possible, current levels of polarization mean that the opposition no longer has an incentive to compromise, and pays no political price for obstructing action. As a result, the American system of checks and balances, which use to work, needs to be reformed so that stuff can get done. Simple reforms include eliminating the filibuster, reforming the electoral college, and broadening the Senate so it is more representative (a good start would be to grant statehood to DC and PR). Once you allow elected government to actually implement an agenda, then stuff gets done. And if their policies fail, or are unpopular, they are held accountable by the electorate: the fear of a "throw the bums out" reaction works pretty well as an incentive for the government in power to "do the right thing". On the other hand, getting things done, if it is the right thing and is popular, will be rewarded by the electorate with a renewed mandate to continue to get things done. It become a virtuous cycle, where incentives work as they should: that is, good works that are popular get rewarded and bad work that is unpopular gets punished. In short, I think Ezra would argue that institutional reform, not blockchain, is the answer.
In regards to your third point, my understanding of the seeming discrepancy between the general conception that "government can't do things" and the simultaneous growth of regulation is largely due to the ever increasing power of regulatory agencies to craft the regulations they carry out. So while Congress may have trouble accomplishing much, the RAs continue to do their thing as they aren't generally constrained, or at least not to the same degree, as the factors that inhibit Congress - whether that's largely due to vetocracy or any other force.
Add in the ever growing unilateral powers of the presidency, government overall can still do a lot, both good and bad (depending on your viewpoint), while simultaneously appearing like they "can't do anything" because Congress frequently has trouble passing legislation, whether it's for something every Congressperson claims to want (e.g. "addressing infrastructure") or one of its actual core functions, like passing a real budget.
So if you define a "libertarian paradise" to be a system in which the government does little to nothing, even though it appears our "government can't do anything," the absence of this "libertarian paradise" (among other reasons) is despite the frequent failings of Congress, on net government continues to grow, which in turn typically means a growth in the burdens it imposes.
The federal government work force has steadily shrunk relative to U.S. population over the last 50 years (https://ourpublicservice.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/FedFigures_FY18-Workforce.pdf) and is smaller than most OECD countries relative to population. I wonder if this is a factor? To what extent is the government hamstringing itself by trying to accomplish ambitious projects without adequate staffing?
Has this public sector shrinking happened at state and local levels too?
Japan seems to have a comparably small public sector as the U.S. at around 6% of total employment. Do they get more done despite that? If so, how?
Much of the conversation here has focused on majority v. minority political dynamics. I'm skeptical that political polarization is in fact a primary cause of vetocracy escalation.
With respect to 'building things' I would argue that dynamics of the administrative state, not the political state, are the more relevant enabler. In the US the only branch of federal government that actually makes stuff is the administrative state within the executive branch. The judicial branch obviously plays a major role in resolving procedural conflict - calling the vetoes - but it doesn't make stuff.
In the administrative sphere we have anointed civil service bureaucracies to act as permanent guardians of those less powerful / minority interests - notably the EPA, FTC and Dept of Labor. As noted elsewhere, those entities have copious incentives to expand both the scope of their jurisdiction and the quantity of regulation. Conversely, they have zero incentive to prune, edit and streamline their regulations. Said another way, it is easier for these agencies to promulgate new regulations than to eliminate or reform existing ones.
These bureaucratic realities raise an interesting question: is the common interest being held hostage by an empowered minority with an intractable anti-growth, don't-build-stuff bias? While I share no ground with the Qanon description of a 'deep state', it is necessary to unpack the culture of the administrative branch if you want to diagnose vetocractic creep.
Despite endless attempts by political appointees to fundamentally change the administrative focus of such agencies, each one clearly retains a core (protective) bias (that arguably aligns best with one political tribe). After said reform efforts, the focus of the agency quickly reverts to the pro-regulatory, expansive ambitions mean. Compounding this problem are the numerous historical examples of administrative agencies expanding the scope of the regulatory purview via unilateral 're-interpretation' of the law (e.g. EPA and Clean Water Act). As a Bush v. Trump comparison demonstrates, political appointees can't really alter the expansive-tending-DNA of these agencies. Instead, per Trump, the more effective way to blunt their bias is to dismantle, de-fund and/or de-legitimize their very existence.
Last argument - in the context of building stuff, local NIMBY veto power is far more relevant that political polarization / national political dynamics. How many planned bridges, railways, overpasses, transit lines etc. have been tanked by local opposition rather than federal regulations? When it comes to making stuff (pharma, mfg, GMO's) federal regulation is clearly the more relevant veto, which brings us back to administrative DNA.
> The crypto solution, which has yet to fully mature, is something like “create structures which it’s impossible for anyone, including the creator, to change”.
This is not a good description of how crypto governance works. A more apt metaphor is that you have an unelected oligarchy (the dev team) that controls its own admission and makes all the laws. Then you have a confederation of… states? corporations? — the mining nodes — which implement those laws and monitor their peers to ensure that they'll all implementing them faithfully, and restrain lawbreakers from having any influence. The sole check on oligarchical power is that any node or group of nodes always have the right to secede and then create or follow some different group of oligarchs. In practice it's more often the threat, rather than the execution of this remedy which keeps the oligarchy in line and implementing some reasonable approximation of the will of the people.
Heh, now that I put it this way it sounds vaguely like NRx, doesn't it? I never thought of it that way until just now.
The problem with crypto, and any other technological solution to a social problem, is that it only works when people buy into it, and legitimacy is the underlying problem that politcal systems need to solve. You could have the most optimal system you like, but people still have to be willing to follow the results
Possible systems of government can vary in how much legitimacy they require to sustain themselves. At one extreme you could have a "government" that can only do anything by unanimous consent and such consent can be revoked at any time — of course this would collapse instantly if it could even be said there was any collapsible structure there to begin with. At the other extreme would be some sort of totalitarian rule by a supervillain who has a robot army so he doesn't have to worry about mutiny by his henchmen. A lot of political philosophy could be framed as seeking to answer the question of how many and what sort of compromises ought to be made away from the first extreme in order to achieve a system that's at once stable and morally acceptable.
I just noticed the same thing a few minutes ago. We probably should both set avatars so it's easier for people to tell us apart when skimming the comments. I can also include my middle name in my display name.
Hey, pontifex, glad to see you back. you should join us at DSL, the forum we set up to preserve the SSC open thread community and use better technology for easier discussions.
I think it's important, that this is not only a US-centric issue but affects other countries like Germany as well (one country with very low polarization according to the other Klein post). There have been several big projects in the past that were significantly delayed (5-10 years) and cost much more (3-8x) than planned: Elbphilharmonie (a concert hall), Stuttgart 21 (a train station) and the BER airport. Each project had its own issues, but AFAICT the problems were a mix of incompetence in the government and (overly?) high building standards. For example the airport was delayed ~8 years in part because the fire safety wasn't deemed good enough, the concert hall became over 100m more expensive over a row on statics alone and the train station faced pressure over some rare insect that was harmed by the build. I can't comment on the validity of these concerns. Civic pressure either didn't happen or didn't succeed (e.g. a complaint about the new flight routes was dismissed in court). So at least over here the problem is less about vetocracy and more about politicians that don't understand how to write good contracts and (over-?)regulation.
But the simple word "over-regulation" misses a distinction. In software engineering there is a process called refactoring: It means "to remove complexity (largely without changing behavior) by identifying common cases and generalizing the process to them". In science, the analogue would be a paper that connects the dots between slightly different approaches in a field and suggests a common methodology. As a rule of thumb, if you don't refactor software it gets so big that no one can work with it anymore (a phenomenon called 'technical debt'). I believe that Germany's (and probably the States's) regulatory environment is not as much over-regulated as it is under-refactored. The problem is not necessary that all of the regulations are slightly useful but too cumbersome as a whole, but rather that we don't have good systems in place for dealing with the extra complexity introduced by them and need an ever increasing amount of lawyers for dealing with it.
> I believe that Germany's (and probably the States's) regulatory environment is not as much over-regulated as it is under-refactored.
This is an extremely good idea.
In the same vein, a constitution should provide the means to lawfully change it (reasonably stabilized against the fad du jour) to reflect the changing values of societies. Otherwise it will require ever more arcane exegesis (of the will of the original prophet/revolutionary/founding fathers/…) and ever more convoluted amendments to avoid being seen as irrelevant.
In the US, at the federal level, refactoring the regulations requires an act of Congress... which can be done in the *House* but not in the malapportioned, filibuster-loving, utterly-broken Senate.
I really think nearly every problem with the US could be solved by abolishing the Senate.
States are much better at refactoring their regulations *because they don't have malapportioned Senates*, thanks to the Baker v. Carr ruling and subsequent ones which forced them to stop malapportioning their State Senates.
> The crypto solution, which has yet to fully mature, is something like “create structures which it’s impossible for anyone, including the creator, to change”. Seems like a pretty drastic solution. But what would a better one look like?
* It's democratic but non-majoritarian in the sense that it has no arbitrary thresholds, whether 50%+1, 2/3rds, unanimity, or other.
* It delivers power not to factions (who must then compromise) but essentially to manifestos, so that we would actually get to test out an ideologically-consistent set of proposals and evaluate how well they work.
* In place of veto points, it uses several mechanisms (including a fake prediction market) so that "everyone’s preferences are taken into account to the degree that they are humane, and that everyone’s humane preferences are realized to an equal extent".
2. Decreased coordination costs for medium-sized groups to advocate against concentrated costs
There are a lot of policies that are net good for society but inflict a cost on some set of stakeholders. For example, right now the US government subsidizes for expensive houses via the mortgage interest tax deduction. This is a diffuse cost (everyone pays a little more in taxes/bears a little more government debt) with a concentrated benefit (rich homeowners get more money). Homeowners are tuned-in enough to politics to pay close attention to anyone who makes any noise about reducing this subsidy, and can easily coordinate to punish politicians who do so. But we don't really have a way for everyone else to coordinate to remove this policy, largely because the benefits are so small per person as not to be worth it.
The costs of coordination is roughly inversely proportional to "how tuned in voters are" or "how intensely scrutinized policy changes are in widely consumed media". Media is cheap, every change is subject to a ton of scrutiny.
That's enough to get a lot of vetocracy right there - scrutiny + interest groups can coordinate and punish + broader society can't coordinate on diffuse benefits looks a lot like vetocracy in practice.
> I'm not sure how Klein thinks of this. Maybe he would say that vetocracy is getting worse everywhere, but that partisan polarization turns potential veto points into actual veto points. That is, the filibuster has always been a potential problem. But Congress was able to get by with it for decades, because everyone was polite and cooperative and didn't want to screw things up too badly
Ezra wrote an entire book on this which Scott claims to have read. The answer is in there. I can't tell if he's not engaging in good faith on this stuff or he just isn't engaged enough in politics to understand the nuances. This is pretty embarrassing though
Sure. The filibuster specifically is an accident of history that was historically not used very much, but this isn't too important.
The country polarizing along party lines since the 60s is indeed the reason potential veto points are actual veto points. But it's really important to understand that's not because previously "everyone was polite and cooperative", it's because the parties were not ideologically coherent. Thus major legislation was cross-coalitional. See the vote totals here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964#Passage_in_the_Senate In 2021 this would just be along party lines, and thus vetocracy. But that was not a great state of affairs either for a bunch of reasons I can get into if you care.
But yeah this is like the crux of Ezra's book, so for Scott to say the "polite and cooperative" line, it tells me he just didn't read it. Which he basically admitted in the review where he claimed not to understand a bunch of key arguments. I think he skimmed this one.
Ezra Klein assumes, based on no analysis whatever, that there exists a multitude of positive return projects just laying around in plain sight, and that the failure to execute on them can be nothing other than a huge institutional failure, both public and private.
In 30+ years performing independent economic analyses on proposed private-sector capital expenditures (ranging from $75 million to $40 billion) I have seen very few good projects and hundreds of bad ones. I do not believe my experience constitutes a set of outliers, nor should this be surprising to anyone who gives it much thought. Making money is hard and competition drives out easy gains. But projects take on a life of their own, as the people who have invested significant time in their planning and justification develop an almost religious faith in them. Large, capital intensive companies will normally vet many, many times more projects than they ever approve, for good reason. And the ones they do fund will almost inevitably underperform projections, even if they wind up being profitable, which they often will not.
So, the problem of profitable private investment is extremely hard, but the problem of investment by government is harder yet. One of the reasons for this is that government decisions are not ultimately constrained by the discipline of the capital markets. Unlike companies that must convince debt and equity investors to put their money into the considered projects and to bear the risks of failure, the government uses its monopoly on the use of violence to simple take money from taxpayers and to force them to bear the risks. This is what allows failures like Solyndra, which was unable to raise money in capital markets where funding is voluntary, but whose government came through with guarantees from the taxpayers who were given no choice. For colorful detail on how and why large investments and in particular, government investments so often go wrong, see “Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition” by Bent Flyvbjerg, et al.
But the government’s dilemma is worse even that that. Unlike a corporation for whom the only (proper) objective is to maximize shareholder wealth, the government is in the position of having to balance the interests of a theoretically limitless set of stakeholders whose desires are usually in conflict. There simply is no quantitative solution to this problem – one cannot even imagine constructing an objective function subject to constraints and then solving that problem to get the proper investment decision. This is necessarily a political problem, which is unsatisfactory, but efforts to get the politics out of them leaves no decision criteria other than caprice. Nice for the untethered decision maker, but bad for the public at large.
As an economist I recognize and accept the idea that the market will tend toward underinvestment in public goods. This does not, however, imply that any and every investment in public goods is warranted or that either democracy or technocracy will somehow (magic?) be able to solve the unsolvable problem of the ‘proper’ allocation of resources to public goods. This is the proper sphere for government, which should proceed cautiously, transparently and with humility.
Government investment in non-public goods, on the other hand, applies institutional incompetence to problems for which its involvement has no moral justification. And there is almost no problem so bad that the active attention of the government cannot make worse.
Very insightful comment. Building things worth building is indeed an incredibly hard problem that doesn't seem to be appreciated by Klein.
Having said, there really seem to be a few positive sum projects that are held back by institutional failures. The clearest example - if San Fransisco were to modestly update its zoning laws, a dozen highly profitable apartment complexes would be built within five years.
I can't speak for Ezra, but I question if he shares your assumption that the only government projects worth doing are the ones that are "positive return".
You are loading onto that phrase more than it is intended to support. A positive return project is one whose benefits exceed the costs. Or are you suggesting the Mr. Klein is advocating for projects whose costs are expected to exceed their benefits?
In the financial sense of "costs" and "benefits", yes, I do doubt that Ezra Klein is restricting his advocacy in this manner.
Indeed, there is no quantitative solution to the question of which projects are "best". But this problem is not restricted to the public sector. I do not share your belief that the only "proper" objective of a private (or public) corporation is to maximize wealth.
I can list off billions of dollars of obviously positive-social-return projects without batting an eye. The most bloody obvious is Medicare for All. A national high speed rail network is equally obvious. Now, I know the detailed reasons why these haven't happened, but it is inarguable that their benefits would vastly exceed their costs. Next question?
It is "bloody obvious" to me that a national high speed rail network would be a colossal boondoggle. It is exactly the type of project that Bent Flyvbjerg wrote about. The standard story for such projects is that they drastically underestimate costs and overestimate use. I'll note that California's high speed rail project was originally planned to be fully operational by now at about a third of the currently projected cost of completion and is now expected to run at significantly slower speeds than first claimed. It is hard to see how it is going to compete with air travel between SF and LA if it ever gets built. As for Medicare for All, I suppose it could be, but it is very far from obvious. For example, the Oregon Medicaid Health Experiment failed to show statistically significant health benefits from enrollment. Given that the impact such a program would have on the existing healthcare financing and provision systems is uncertain (e.g. would it impact the typically much more comprehensive private health insurance offerings, perhaps even ending that market completely?) makes its cost/benefit relationship tricky to estimate and far from obvious. Finally, you are faced with the problem of politically determined investment. Currently a majority of the country would, I think, oppose both programs. So their net benefits are, almost by definition, not obvious. So how do you convince voters that they are wrong if you will not deign to perform actual analysis? I hope not by insisting that anyone who doesn't see the same obvious payoff that you do is immoral?
No, not immoral. Just stupid or brainwashed or ignorant! For you, since you're stupid or brainwashed or ignorant:
(1) China has built high speed rail at reasonable cost. Europe has. Japan has. Taiwan has. FFS, Morocco has.
If the US can't do it, it just means the US is broken. The need for HSR is obvious. Cars don't scale up to high travel volumes and airplanes create too much pollution to use for short hauls.
(2) Single-payer would cut out the completely wasted expenditure on paperwork. This is actually, I am not kidding, 50% of the "medical" costs in the US. HALF. Armies of paper-pushers at doctors offices fighting with armies of paper-pushers at hospitals. They DO NOT EXIST in countries with single-payer systems. With the savings from firing them, we could provide universal coverage for everyone AND pay all the fired paper-pushers enhanced unemployment compensation for two years. THIS HAS ACTUALLY BEEN STUDIED.
Oh, definitely some signs of "brainwashed", BTW. Everyone who has done their homework knows that the CAHSR project cost numbers were artificially inflated by changing the inflation estimate methodology; it's coming in at about 1.5 times the original cost estimates if you don't sneakily change what year's dollars you're using (which a sabotage bill set up by Republicans forced them to do).
You make strong argument. Particularly the part where you tell me I'm either stupid, brainwashed or ignorant. It's hard to refute that type of incisive analysis.
Having read Ezra Klein since he was a teenager I'm pretty confident about his definition of "vetocracy:" It's basically a system in which a very small minority (such as an individual President) can block consensus or otherwise invalidate the will of even a very large majority.
With this understanding there's nothing wrong with frameworks that permit vetos. Unadulterated lower-case d democracy really would be pretty brutal without it, vetos are actually a good thing. It's not that the wisdom of crowds isn't a thing -- it's that, as Lincoln dryly quipped, the wisdom of crowds is neither continuous nor is it instantaneous.
The key phrase though is "frameworks that permit vetos." Just as a system that makes it easy for everyone overrule anybody ("pure" democracy) would be highly problematic, a system that let anyone overrule everybody (a "vetocracy") has similarly obvious problems.
The question is how to find a balance so that Mennonite and Catholic students aren't forced to recite Protestant prayers in public schools on the one hand, while not letting Bay Area NIMBYs exploit environmental review of an existing parking lot block development of low-income housing.
One of the keys to "why does this keep happening" is probably related to Pareto efficiency: "Pareto efficiency is when an economy has its resources and goods allocated to the maximum level of efficiency, and no change can be made without making someone worse off." -- Wikipedia. When the system allows anyone who's made worse off to block changes that would make everyone else off (arguably including the "offended party" as in the case of wearing masks during a pandemic, for instance) the obstacles they're able to raise (file a suit, get an injunction, place a Senate hold, threaten a filibuster) can make it easier to just not bother.
The end result (to borrow another line from Pareto) is that instead of obtaining 80% of a desire result with 20% effort/cost/time we end up in a situation 80% of effort, cost, and time must be expended to get even 20% of the desired result.
In the end a lot of stuff ends up not happening because it's just too much effort to overcome even small amounts of resistance. I'm not sure you could call that authentic "vetocracy" but it's a good enough shorthand.
I'm a fan of David Deutsch's explanation for democracy as error correction: democracy works not because "the will of the people" is correct, but because democratic institutions are good at removing ineffective leaders and policies (ie correct errors). This is because it's impossible to always prevent errors since the future is unknowable, so the best we can do is try things and then correct the errors. The corollary of this is that democracy depends on (1) experimentation and (2) voters being able to accurately blame a leader or party for an error. Vetocracy makes (1) worse by making it harder to pass experimental policies, and hinders (2) because policies are shaped in part by vetoers separate from the electoral process.
This is something that's scary about our democracy: we know it works, but we don't know quite why it works, so we don't know which parts are indispensable and which are vestigial. Vetocracy is dangerous because it damages our democracy without necessarily attacking any of its visible infrastructure (eg elections, civil rights, etc.)
I agree 100% with this analysis -- 100%. The US Senate is particularly infamous for concealing blame, with the filibuster used to vote "for" bills while making them fail, thus being against a bill while pretending to be for it.
> The crypto solution, which has yet to fully mature, is something like “create structures which it’s impossible for anyone, including the creator, to change”.
Talk of the big things crypto can do makes me a bit suspicious; there's just so much short/medium-term financial interest in favor of hyping crypto that feels like it could be distorting downstream discourse. Like, it feels like we've been in roughly the same place of "the truly important uses of crypto are yet to be realized" for a while now?
It could easily be that I just don't get it or that it might be yet to come, though.
But concretely, how does crypto help us defeat our archenemy the FDA?
Is it that an alternative FDA will be built on crypto infrastructure -- like you design a formal structure on top of crypto infrastructure which interfaces with humans and human organizations in such a way that it is incentivized to produce stamps of some form on different drugs that are just really good & discriminatory information on drugs? So good that it will organically just kind of take over as the premier authoritative institution on drugs?
Where the crypto's advantage over regular FDA is the possibility is that there are none of these vetocracy-type strings to pull on to make the CryptoFDA super conservative?
Or is it something like cryptocurrencies will allow us to conduct economic activity without fiat currency, and this will make it easy for us to live generally outside the influence of the government. Like money is the material of the chains government places on us, and by switching to crypto we dissolve the chains and then we are free (this is a vague story, reflecting my own lack of understanding).
In an emergency like the current pandemic, people are willing to overlook side effects in order to get the new drug/vaccines/whatsit out fast. So what if it makes all your hair fall out, would you prefer to die?
In ordinary times, if you rush through (say) a migraine medication but a side-effect is that a thousand people find all their hair falls out, they will go to court over this.
"Why is this happening here and now" is generally a great question to ask about broad trends, but it seems almost unnecessary here. It seems like institutions have been adding more veto points over time, so... when you keep doing that, eventually you have too many of them?
Agree! What if the process is "as time passes, veto points increase?"
We might falsify this by identifying instances when the number of veto points decreased. When I think of "permissionless innovation" I think of new frontiers being opened up, not existing veto points relaxing.
"if the government can't do anything, why aren't we a libertarian paradise?"
Because they won't let us do anything either. Next time you go to a convenience store, look for their "permit board" which lists all the permits they need to stay in business. Contrast that with Guatemala where many people run a tiny bodega out of their front room.
"Don't we eventually reach the point where the government can't implement more regulations on itself, and then disappears in a puff of logic?"
We WILL reach the point where nobody will loan any actual money to the USG, and printing up new money just creates inflation. Then you get Mises' crack-up collapse. We kinda don't have to worry about the extent of the US government because it's going to cease to have the resources to do anything, and soon. Read Neal Stephanson's Snowcrash.
"If this is true, is there anything to do about it?"
Yes. States need to put their foot down and say to the federal government "The Constitution does not give you the power to do this. But still, we're going to get you do it for interstate commerce. But if you try to do it for intrastate commerce, we will stop you." So people will be able to just start businesses and sell things and not need any kind of permit. Oh, I mean, people in free states like New Hampshire, Montana, Florida, or Nevada. Not people in New York or New Jersey.
'Five years would not surprise me, but I've anticipated this for most of my adult life'
During your adult life, has the amount of years away you think this is been gradually decreasing or has it stayed roughly constant? Like, 10 years ago, did you think it was 5 years away, like you think now, or did you think it was 10 years away? How long away did you think it was 20 years ago?
A big part of the problem of overall government is that new legislation is bolted on top of previous legislation, then you end up with five different schemes to do basically the same thing operating at once, contradictory regulations, and nobody wanting to make the first move to scrap the whole thing and start over because of the threat of law cases by some ambulance-chaser opportunist lawyer or special interest group going to court over "by repealing this legislation our members will suffer terrible hardship", never mind that it's difficult to dismantle the towering, creaky, swaying house of cards without causing more damage than you are trying to remedy.
That was not really a single sentence, was it? But yes, legislation is hard to read and harder to understand precisely because it consists of changes to existing law.
Go Russ! Love any post that synthesizes Snowcrash into political discourse. You also have my sympathies for your small biz / states rights libertarian vision. Even if the scale-or-die DNA of American business culture effectively guaranties that any assertion of states rights to counter the endless creep of the commerce clause will fail (because big biz wants uniform market standards).
How much of the increase in veto points etc. is just a matter of growth? More people, crowded into ever growing cities, and especially crowding into successful metro areas like SF? Seems to me that growth in and of itself creates exactly this dynamic.
1. I feel like this intersects with previous discussions of "cost disease".
2. there's something more fundamental here, and I see it in the comments.
I see it everywhere. I think it has something to do with the internet. Not just the obvious things people have talked about regarding polarization and such.. but..
Pretty much no matter what it is, discussions on facebook tend to go in a godwinny, my side your side your side direction, even if its something stupid and in theory apolitical like fandoms opinions about stuff within their fandoms.
Social media plays on certain incentive structures. But also... the more percentage of time spend on social media, the more their lived experience reflects the dynamics of those interactions.
Let me make a personal contrast- there are some social groups where very passive aggressive commentary and social dynamics based on this is the norm. In those communtiies, the ideas that anyway would resort to violence over this is fundamentally absurd, this would result in violation of an extreme social taboo where the person who responded in such a way was universally condemned.
On the other hand, in certain urban punk scenes, where people live in collective houses, squat, etc, conversations tend to be more respectful. On some level because of a shared sense of community, but on another level because doing that passive aggressive shit would get you punched in the face.
My point?
Before social media, people's lived experience included more "real life" friends (as measured by many statictics) and some need for more "social trust", at least within their circles of friends and community. This lived experience is quite difference from what many people know experience where friends are fewer but "allies" are both cheap, affordable, and disposable.
The time spent living in this "real world" dynamiuc versus time spent in a social media online dyanamic probably has something to do with it- as people have less practical experience of the "social trust" deal.
"Since regulating corporations and private individuals is an attempt to protect the vulnerable from too-hastily-applied power"
My impression as a Southern Californian is that vetocracy as we know it emerged around 1969 with the environmental movement in places like Santa Barbara, Beverly Hills and Malibu. The unstated but underlying goal was to protect the best-off from the well-off, for example, by making Beverly Hills housing too expensive for, say, San Fernando Valley orthodontists to move in en masse.
The population counts of these superb places have barely changed over the decades. For example, here is Beverly Hills' population trends:
"Recently [Ezra] followed it up with an editorial in the New York Times arguing that California, for all its supposed liberalism, was structurally conservative - it's good at cosmetic nods to progressive aesthetics, but incapable of progress toward real progressive goals. Its vetocracy is too entrenched to let anyone change anything."
Feature, not bug. Basically, everybody in California thinks California was best when they first got there. (That's sort of true, although a few things, most notably air quality, have improved dramatically.) And everybody in California worries that the rest of the world will someday wise up and want to move to California.
So, an enormous amount of effort has gone into vetoing new construction to keep the masses out.
Similarly, Robert Moses' downfall began when he tried to build a freeway through Greenwich Village, which people with cultured taste had long prized as a far-above average urban neighborhood.
This focus on political inaction is misguided. Most of our “inability to build” arises not from the inability to pass new legislation but from the accretion of cruft over time in all “legible” (in the James Scott sense) constructs, whether it be code, regulations or just procedures/processes themselves. This sclerosis is not unique to the United States and it is not even unique to governments. It is the eventual fate of all large, old bureaucratic organisations - private or public. Bureaucracy + time = Vetocracy.
Most of this buildup occurs due to the natural need to deal with more and more scenarios and prevent gaming/abuse of the process (e.g. contractors gaming a bidding process). What starts out as a simple, legible process eventually transforms into a complex, illegible mess. Anything legible follows this pattern unless explicitly fought against - refactoring is an example of a practise that expressly tries to fight this decay. In larger, older organisations it is not realistic to expect much refactoring. No one ever gets promoted for doing “maintenance” work like refactoring.
This phenomenon isn’t even unique to capitalism. The Soviet Union was a great example of this evolution - by the 70s it was completely unable to evolve. As Robert Service pointed out, “the number of ‘normative acts’ of legislation in force across the USSR had risen to 600,000” by then. All that was possible was Brezhnevian “stability” and any attempt at true reform was more likely to trigger collapse (as Gorbachev found out).
You can’t solve this problem by making things more legible. Therefore crypto or “smart contracts” do nothing to solve this problem and may make it worse. Having an increasingly complex, arcane process enforced by crypto may make it worse as it becomes literally impossible to avoid the constraints enforced by the machine (as I describe here https://macroresilience.substack.com/p/an-explanation-for-our-current-institutional).
There are a _few_ refactoring experts (in software at least) that probably get paid very well for doing that kind of maintenance, at least some times!
But I've personally had a good amount of success 'selling' minimally incremental pieces of large refactoring goals – refactoring on installment in a sense. I'm pretty sympathetic to the general confusion and skepticism of outsiders ('management') about the need to regularly refactor anything and everything – to them it really does seem frivolous. I think that's mostly due to unfamiliarity – it's very clear how helpful refactoring would be when you're inside the 'plumbing' of some 'spaghetti'. I'd imagine people can spot the benefits of cleaning up a bunch of physical cables or wires! I think myopia plays a part too, as even software people often only pay lip service to the need to refactor.
One explanation worth considering is the US simply is bigger, has more interest groups and will thus gravitate towards creating more veto-points. What makes doing things simpler in smaller countries with less interest groups might not be something that can be scaled up. Other big countries like China or India don´t put as much consideration on groups interests as US does.
I think much of the problem derives from the American system of paying lawyers even if you win. (In many countries the typical case is that if the judge agrees you were in the right all along, your opponent pays much or all of your lawyer's fees.)
This system makes it expensive to sue the government, so the right to sue is insufficient as a check on the government's power. Hence veto powers, which provide an additional check. The systematic long-term costs that this incurs is a lot less obvious than the benefit of being able to defend your rights without losing lots of money.
Scott, I think you’re conflating laws with regulations. Ezra Klein’s arguments about vetocracy talks about laws passed by congress. Regulation keeps getting larger because there are many fewer veto points- generally speaking, regulatory agencies don’t need congress to approve new or expanded regulations.
Another point is that Ezra Klein seems to be wrong because the framers specifically wanted a bias for inaction. Maybe our bias for inaction became stronger, or maybe like with your argument about scientific research, we already got most of the low-hanging fruit so now it gets harder.
Dovetail is Elon musk on Rogan speaking about why we need the FAA, but that pure disaster avoidance leaves out half the equation: the lives lost because of the innovations not made.
"Recently he followed it up with an editorial in the New York Times arguing that California, for all its supposed liberalism, was structurally conservative - it's good at cosmetic nods to progressive aesthetics, but incapable of progress toward real progressive goals. Its vetocracy is too entrenched to let anyone change anything.
Nobody who’s ever looked into the housing crisis in San Francisco will disagree here, but it raises some complicated questions that need some sorting out."
If I go by the recent scandal, the problem with San Francisco is that local government is stupendously corrupt and everyone plus their hangers-on, acolytes, toadies, minions, and friends and family of all the above are making shedloads of money out of the convolutions of the system, therefore they have absolutely no incentive to reform any of it (especially since they might have to go to jail or even worse, disgorge the money they skimmed).
One reason for a "vetocracy" is Frank Herbert's The Bureau of Sabotage. Before he created Dune, he was writing space-age official saboteurs in the 50s-70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Sabotage
"In Herbert's fiction, sometime in the far future, government becomes terrifyingly efficient. Red tape no longer exists: laws are conceived of, passed, funded, and executed within hours, rather than months. The bureaucratic machinery becomes a juggernaut, rolling over human concerns and welfare with terrible speed, jerking the universe of sentients one way, then another, threatening to destroy everything in a fit of spastic reactions. In short, the speed of government goes beyond sentient control (in this fictional universe, many alien species co-exist, with a common definition of sentience marking their status as equals).
Founded by the mysterious "Five Ears" of unknown species, BuSab began as a terrorist organization whose sole purpose was to frustrate the workings of government in order to give sentients a chance to reflect upon changes and deal with them. Having saved sentiency from its government, BuSab was officially recognized as a necessary check on the power of government. It provides a natural (and lucrative) outlet for society's regular crop of troublemakers, who must be countered by society's regular crop of "do-gooders".
First a corps, then a bureau, BuSab gained legally recognized powers to interfere in the workings of any world, of any species, of any government or corporation, answerable only to themselves. Their motto is, "In Lieu of Red Tape."
Forbidden from committing acts of sabotage against private citizens, BuSab acts as a monitor of, and a conscience for, the collective sentiency, watching for signs of anti-sentient behaviour by corporate or government entities and preserving the dignity of individuals. Some essential functions of government are immune from BuSab by statute. BuSab is opposed by such organizations as the "Tax Watchers" who have successfully lobbied to grant themselves the same immunity from BuSab enjoyed by agencies such as public utilities.
BuSab monitors even itself and employs sabotage to prevent the agency from slipping into hidebound stasis. Agents are promoted to the head of the organization by successfully sabotaging the Secretary. By the same token, there is no term limit imposed on the Secretary of the Bureau of Sabotage. As long as he is alert enough to avoid being sabotaged, he remains qualified to lead BuSab."
I think the broader historical answer to “ People have wanted fewer bad things forever, so any explanation of increasing vetocracy should start with an explanation of why this is becoming a problem now. ”
Is probably “Your [company / regime / nation / dynasty / civilization] grows ossified, collapsed, and is supplanted by a née one with fewer veto points”
I guess the localist solution would be 'minimize vetoes by only allowing directly effected people a veto'.
An organization with 10 wild vetoes on the loose is a lot easier to run than one with 1000. You can get the 10 vetoes in a room and hash out an agreement in an afternoon, while with 1000 it looks more like the UN general assembly where a trade agreement stretches to thousands of pages and takes years.
The corollary would be, 'don't let any one issue effect too many people'. Big multinational corporations having a major financial incentive to veto local laws (eg https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/business/north-dakota-app-store-bill.html) is one of the best arguments I know for not having big multinational corporations, or at least barring them from your jurisdiction if you can.
Of course, this brings you closer to the 'fall for every trap Moloch can devise' end of the spectrum. And that is solved by decreasing the number of jurisdictions (ideally to one) and you can only do both by having less absolute number of humans. So maybe Malthus was right & we're just running out of coordination power before we run out of food.
"Vetocracy" seems like a species of the genus "anticommons"--sometimes applied in the context of property law, but applicable in other contexts. Described by Michael Heller in a Harvard Law Review in the 1990s, summarized here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
A specific example of vetocracy in action: the failure to renovate and improve Penn Station in New York City. The project has been held up by various forms of bickering for over 30 years because nobody actually has the power to be Robert Moses and say "fuck you, we're doing this whether you want us to or not".
The flaw with the increased regulation thesis is that the article does not present strong evidence that regulations are actually increasing beyond "everybody knows they do".
I know, it is the most persistent talking point among businesses, but the Ease of Doing Business around the world index has been published since 2004, and does not show a strong trend towards increased regulation in the US. For example, the number of procedures needed to build a warehouse fell from 19 in 2006 to 15.8 in 2017 (although the time needed to do so rose from 70 to 80 days). For other indicators, there is no strong change either. As an aside: it is often a libertarian assertion that governments almost never revoke regulations, and they just keep increasing. Internationally, this is, at least accoding to the index, wrong, as there is a very strong trend towards less regulation (although more so in developing countries than developed nations where the trend exists but is weaker).
Since Scott is a Psychiatrist, I thought he might relate Vetocracy to the psychology of saying "No". Saying "No" is multi-dimensional, but ultimately it is about power whether in personal relationships or institutional settings. Anyone who has worked in a large organization where multi-levels of approval are needed has experienced the executives who no matter what will always say no the first time a request arrives.
As an example, in getting papers approved for publication, a common practice is to put in something for an approver to delete because then when deleted they will approve......
Whatever happens to constructive criticism among all these vetos? It should be possible to apply some controls to bucket vetos by intent and sentiment, correct?
The story about polarization/vetocracy that I've heard Ezra express on his podcast is pretty close to Scott's guess. Basically: The US government has a lot of veto points, but used to get things done in spite of these, because we had lower polarization between the parties. This usually comes up when people ask him what we should do about polarization - which usually boils down to "polarization is likely here to stay, and may even be desirable, but in order for it not to break us we need less veto points."
I have 1 major problem with this piece: Why the automatic assumption that these veto points are bad things?
There's veto points to protect worker conditions, to protect the environment, to protect endangered species, to stop corruption... All of those are good things!
Back in the 17th century, the most profitable enterprise in the world was sending ships to the East Indies (side note: People often think this means India, but actually this means the lands east of India. So South-East Asia and Indonesia). This was absurdly profitable, with returns in the many hundreds of percents. These ships also regularly came back with a third of their crew dead or missing, if they came back at all.
If we had had stricter labor laws back then, the Dutch and British golden ages would have been far less rich. But that's not a bad thing! Not for those hundreds of thousands of sailors who would have survived, not to mention the native populations.
Looking at the world today, I'm sure there are some bad veto points. Obviously there will be inefficiencies in any complex system. But I see no evidence that these veto points are a bad things on average. I don't even see an attempt to make the argument. Just the automatic assumption that regulation must be bad.
So... what? If we want to build a road we should just bulldoze over everything in the way? People? Nature? Endangered Species? Ancient Burial Grounds? And if a third of the workers die during construction, we should look the other way? Because that's the logical consequence of saying there should not be any veto points.
Scott writes: "People have wanted fewer bad things forever, so any explanation of increasing vetocracy should start with an explanation of why this is becoming a problem (sic!) now."
But this is obvious! We're living at the first time in history where people have the power to enforce fewer bad things. Those 17th century sailors didn't want to die either! They just had no way to enforce safer labor conditions.
Western Europe has a lot more veto points than the USA. Stricter environmental laws, stricter labor laws, stricter privacy laws, higher food and safety standards, the list goes on. As a result, the US GDP is slightly higher, but average living standards in Western Europe are much higher, as well as indices for well-being and happiness.
Ah, but Western Europe has a lot fewer veto points than the US in the most critical area.
Specifically: if the lower house of Parliament passes a law, in *practically every country in Europe*, there is nobody who can actually veto it. The upper houses mainly have delay power (as in the British House of Lords); the EU and Council of Europe have the power to disapprove or to threaten retaliation in many cases; but in almost every case, the popularly elected lower house is supreme and can steamroller them if they want.
The equivalent in the US would be if the House could simply override the Senate and the President provided it spent enough time doing so.
Just because there is 1 veto point in the US that does not exist in Western Europe does not mean that the US has more veto points overall. A veto point in the context of what Scott was writing is not a literal veto, it's points at which groups can delay or stop decision making processes. The EU generally has stricter environmental laws, labor laws, privacy laws, etc, meaning decisions to, for example, build a road, can be challenged for many more reasons.
Anyway, my argument is that veto points are good things (or at least that Scott has completely failed to make the argument that they could be bad). Precisely which territory has more veto points is secondary at best.
If you look at the history of the US, the malapportioned-Senate veto point has been causing this sort of problem since *day one* and actually caused the Civil War. The way around it was adding new states, until they ran out of land to carve into new states. So this isn't actually new. What's odd is that the US has managed to not collapse earlier (except when it did, in the case of the Civil War).
The history of other countries is one of the removal of veto points.
The moses problem seems easy enough to fix (in principle; the politics are hard now that we are here): have lots of veto points for government coercion, but not for private initiative. If Moses wants to build his road through poor ppl's houses he has to have a million listening sessions. If a private developer wants to build something it can just buy the houses, and buy any renters out of their contracts, at prices the people being displaced are willing to accept. Better yet, make Moses do the same, instead of having listening sessions. People who are actually harmed by the project get the compensation they need to make it fair; everyone else can stfu.
the only purpose of an authoritarian socialist government that i can see would be its ability to achieve/build large projects rather rapidly and efficiently. But such a government would need a visionary at the helm, vs. the despots the role tends to attract - and no - trudeau is no such visionary.
The main problem, I believe, comes from a deep misdiagnosing the problem. The problem is not over-regulation. The problem is outdated regulation. Since the rise of neoliberal mantra of "government should govern the less" in the 70s more and more roadblocks for new regulation were raised.
In effect this means many public policy fields are stuck in 50s and 60s regulatory frameworks, deeply outdated in regards to both technological and societal advancements. A thing many libertarians will never aknowledge is that a good regulation is actually necessary for a free market to remain free. An up-to-date, quality regulation has a great potential to advance competition and innovation. But the US has relinquished all capacity to create and enforce such regulations. The result are 21st century tech giants regulated by laws that were built for paper news stands and telegraphs. Cities dealing with 21st century problems using 50s euclidian zoning practices. 21st century internet content creators, publishers and platforms governed by a copyright law written in 1976.
So monkeys understand Chesterton's Fence...
>The “why now?” question seems like it could be related to a wealthier society having more money and luxury to spend towards activism, political engagement, etc.
This was essentially my first thought, too. As society gets richer, we can afford to be more careful with decision-making and execution--but we pay the price of getting less done.
I think we observe the same phenomena with the lifecycle of businesses: a startup can "move fast and break things", but once it grows into a large company, it becomes "do what you can while moving carefully".
But that doesnt really explain why building railroads in the US is several orders of magnitude more expensive than in comparably wealthy countries.
Are there any comparatively wealthy countries to the US that aren't tiny? The GDP per capita of the US is almost 20000 dollars more than Germany for example.
According to indexmundi here https://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=67 , the US GDP PPP is 59,800 vs Germany's 50,800. The US having 17.7% higher GDP per capita PPP is pretty significant.
Another thing to consider is the states that are closest to Germany. There's a not very nice joke in international political economy "That God for Alabama." The... humor, for lack of a better word, is that Germany, the richest EU state, would be poorer per capita than every individual US states, except for Alabama. Sometimes Germany would be merely in the bottom 10, depending on how exactly you measure it, but it doesn't bode well.
As to size, Germany covers some 137,988 square miles. The USA, some 3,797,000 square miles, or just under 3 million if you exclude Alaska and Hawaii. So, yes, sorry, Germany is tiny by comparison.
I thought it was "Thank god for Mississippi"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_God_for_Mississippi
I'd buy that... might depend on the year and the conference :)
It is a funny joke, but it should really be "Thank God for Florida, and also Arizona, Montana, Maine, Kentucky, South Carolina, Alabama, Idaho, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Mississippi". Germany would be a bottom-quartile US state, but barely so, not fighting it out with Alabama and/or Mississippi for last place.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/248063/per-capita-us-real-gross-domestic-product-gdp-by-state/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/295465/germany-gross-domestic-product-per-capita-in-current-prices/
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com (because the first two use different base years)
I want to jump in here to make the point that some people assume that GDP differences must mean America is better run than Germany (not that you have said this to be clear). However, this isn't necessarily true- America has the advantage of economies of scale and several other factors.
Do they consider the high cost of infrastructure in PPP adjustments?
Anyway not sure that this is an adjustment that's obviously relevant given that we asking "why is infrastructure expensive?" not "what is the mean ability for people to buy goods and services?"
It's a bit relevant if we are considering the wealth of a country vis a vie its ability to make things.
You are right, though, that infrastructure is awkward. It seems to become more expensive and difficult to produce the wealthier a country is. Usually for PPP you are trying to see what the money spent by people actually buys, instead of just the exchange rate (if you look at housing differences this becomes important) but as you say, people don't really buy infrastructure, but get taxed and hope it happens. Plus how much infrastructure gets used and how much value people get out of it is really tough too, since it isn't priced in the normal way. Apropos to the rail discussion above, Phoenix spends a ton on light rail, but has hardly any more transit ridership than it did with just buses a decade or so ago. The rail is super expensive by comparison, and requires a lot more subsidy to have running. So... are Phoenicians getting more or less infrastructure for their money? In terms of physical stuff, more maybe. In terms of use of physical stuff per dollar, a lot less it would seem.
We are beginning to bounce into the semipermeable membrane of rationalizing social processes, particularly the measuring bit.
The continental US is larger than the European Union and the distance from LA TO NYC is ~900 miles more than the distance from Paris to Moscow as the crow flies. The EU also has over 100 million extra people contributing to overall GDP.
Perhaps this is a naive assessment, but for the example of railroads, It seems likely a US Railroad would need to be much longer, and thus require more materials, more land, and more labor to build compared to a European one of comparable practical value and with the cost spread over fewer tax payers.
Also, it's my understanding that Europe is well-populated pretty much all over, while the US has it's population concentrated on the coasts with the reagion between the Appalachians and Rockies mostly empty by comparison... As such, if you wanted to build a pan-European Railroad from scratch, most of the member states could probably afford to build their own sections while a theoretical pan-American Railroad would probably need Federal backing to build sections passing through the most sparsely populated states.
Similar can be said of various other things: Roads, high-speed internet, long distance power transmission... If you need infrastructure to transport something between important locations, in many cases, that infrastructure needs to cover much more ground in theUS than the EU, and in some cases, that infrastructure has to pass through areas where there aren't enough locals to make building it a local priority.
Germany might be a Giant by European standards, but it's beaten in land mas by 4 US states, 3 of which are in the continental US... and Texas beats even France and Ukraine, so I think calling Germany tiny compared to the US is a reasonable assessment.
Admittedly, the above really only applies to things that have to span whole continents to do their job properly and doesn't explain things such as one city of a million people lacking enough hospitals when a different city of a million people having room to spare hospital beds for overflow from neighboring towns.
That's all true, but most railroads, or proposed new tracks or lines (or whatever they're called) are in the most densely populated areas, e.g. coastal California or the The Sprawl (basically Baltimore to Boston). And NYC's costs are an order of magnitude higher than (roughly) comparable metro areas in other developed countries (e.g. Japan).
Certainly _some_ of that difference can be attributed to, e.g. a 20% higher PPP, but not an order of magnitude.
GDP ain't everything. Take a walk through Stuttgart or Osaka, and then take a stroll through San Francisco or Chicago. When you're done, ask yourself which places felt more wealthy.
Can't do that, there's a pandemic, I'll have to just imagine doing this in a way that confirms my priors... :P
Anyway I think my point stands that there aren't really peer countries to the US on this type of measurement, which could mean that it is something similar to what is measured by GDP per capita is causing the high costs.
GDP is well correlated to cost of living, which is what determines things like the prices of things, h=which is what this question was about.
I'm happy to say that places with dirt-poor cost of living but great infrastructure culture/etc. can 'feel more wealthy' than places with high cost of living and none of that. But in terms of 'why do things cost more here,' the GDP is relevant.
Alon Levy is the person to read on that. He doesn't have anything like a full explanation, but he gives many partial explanations. He is also particularly interested in the question of why construction costs and efficiency don't live up to our stereotypes - e.g., Spain and Korea are the most efficient places to build things, with Scandinavia just behind; Germany, Japan, Italy, and the Netherlands are middling; Singapore and Hong Kong are quite bad; UK and US are just off the charts.
Here's one post about this, but you should explore much of the rest of his blog if you want to learn more:
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-costs-are-so-high-work-in-progress/
Every possible veto point adds delays and costs to the process. If you need to build a railroad across 100 miles, and every 10 miles there's a different little government jurisdiction that can vote to veto, you have to hassle with negotiating with ALL of them. In addition, there are labor disputes and unions that can veto your construction unless you pay them more money, there are environmental agencies that can veto unless you do what they want, and so on. In addition, every material input has some sort of vetocracy making its own prices higher (like in the union labor example).
Yup, and your railroad is useless unless you have a continuous pair of rails running from point A to point B. Typically there is only one, maybe two routes you can use because railroads need tracks that are practically level. 1% incline is fairly steep by railroad standards. Horseshoe Curve west of Altoona PA isn't even 2% and trains sometimes struggle to get up it even with two engines in the front and two pushing from the back.
Oh, you want to build a railroad? First, you'll need an archeological dig done, to ensure that you're not going to disturb any historical sites. Second, you'll need an environmental study done, to ensure that you aren't harming any bugs or bunnies. Third, you'll need a building permit, because everything needs to be vetoes unless it has a building permit. Fourth, you'll need to own or acquire an easement over all the property you wish to use. Back in the good old days, that used to be easy, because people wanted a railroad on their property because that meant prosperity. You can tell -- all the fancy Victorian homes in the US can be found only in towns that had a railroad. Fifth, you'll need a permit from whomever controls the waterways nearby, because you can't allow to make ANY changes without one, and chances are that all the changes you want to make, you can't.
Basically, there is stop energy everywhere you turn.
One of mine from 2012. (The proposed stadium was never built.)
https://strategyprofs.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/the-history-tax/
Looks like shakedowns adding up to moral panics to me. Say I'm a crooked politician shaking down a business for bribes, I have media badmouth the business, things get out of hand and there are moral panics against the evils of building steel, cars, dams, small planes, nuclear power plants, highways, railroads, software, so forth. Next guys I shake down know I can break them easily. What's stopping me?
1962 D-JFK breaks US Steel to the Clintons bribed to nick Microsoft good nothing stopped me.
But why are there moral panics about things that, 60-80 years ago, were the symbols of progress and a better future? It can't *just* be a hangover from days of Robert Moses, can it?
Once you have a physical capital investment you have a magnet for shakedowns. Railroads got shook down from the moment they were built. It's one reason we switched to trucking from railroads- it's harder to shake down a trucking company that just needs a parking lot and access to a highway, than to shake down a railroad with tracks just sitting there.
I'm thinking the "Why now?" may have something to do with the fragmentation of media. People with power want to keep power. When bad ideas come by, they are expected to stop them or risk losing power. This is true even when they have no stake in stopping bad ideas.
When there were only a few TV stations and newspapers that mattered, it was pretty simple. If none of these respectable outlets were against a new idea, it was safe to let it pass. Even if it was bad in retrospect, they could defend themselves by pointing out that no one knew at the time.
Now there is so much media that someone is attacking every idea. If they let something pass, an opponent can find some media showing that a responsible, well informed, person would have KNOWN it was bad.
It's less safe for people with veto power to do nothing when they don't care about an issue. At the very least they should raise some objection to protect themselves later.
And the bar for a bad outcome has been lowered. Even a net positive policy might produce one emotional story of an innocent being negatively affected which is enough ammunition for a negative campaign.
EVERY net positive policy will produce negative stories. Policy is hard and complicated. Over a large enough scale, there will be something that goes wrong. If the policy is designed to restrict behavior it will be interpreted to restrict some good behavior as well. If it is to enable behavior it will be interpreted to allow some bad behavior as well. If the policy is to force coordination where society and market have failed, this force will cause problems as well.
I think you might also put it slightly differently - in a very poor society, there might be many ways to improve things and only a few they could get worse, while in a richer society, there are more ways that changes could make things go wrong. Thus, wealthy societies might *rationally* be more risk-averse.
(Compare: in a complex organism, there are far more ways for a mutation to be harmful than in a simple organism. Thus, mammal DNA tends to have many different error correcting mechanisms, and thus far fewer mutations than viral DNA or RNA.)
The bureaucracy is like cancer: it has an incentive to grow without limit. Why now? Because there are more and more things you cannot do.
In a nutshell, vetocracy derives from the fear of majority rule. People tend to think that relying on majority rule will mean a constant oppression of a specific minority by a specific majority. But people are different in numerous dimensions, there are no fixed majorities. This gives rise to a kind of consensual government that both protects all sorts of minorities - because everyone is a minority in some dimension - but also is capable to move ahead decisively when it really benefits the common good. Read Anthony Mcgann.
And Huey Li
Robert Moses didn't really seem like that much of a representative of majority rule. Bureaucrats can have a certain amount of autonomy & discretion, which only got increased when we junked the spoils system & professionalized the civil service.
My argument is not bureaucracy vs elected representatives. It is majority vs vetoes and supermajorities. Majority rule is perfectly capable of establishing professionalized civil services. The UK, for example, never had supermajority requirements until recently (and even now it is debatable how binding the requirement is). Still, they always have had some of the leading civil services.
I don't think you understand the point. We had Robert Moses, who was an example of autonomous bureaucracy rather than "majority rule". A backlash to him established more veto points, but that was NOT due to fears of "majority rule" but instead an unelected bureaucrat riding roughshod over the people affected by his decisions. I never said anything about it being impossible to establish a professionalized civil service in a system that doesn't require supermajorities. I am saying that bureaucracies can face veto points just as legislatures can. And as governing gets more complex and legislatures rely more on bureaucracies to decide what to do, the veto points faced by bureaucracies will get more important.
Reading Robert Caro "The Power Broker - Robert Moses and The Fall of New York" one certainly gets a picture of personal power run amok and institutionalized corruption. (Not sure why he was cited here?) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/23/the-power-broker-robert-moses-and-the-fall-of-new-york-robert-caro-review
I'm citing him as an example of a bureaucrat who did not represent "majority rule", and the backlash to him resulted in a lot of "veto points".
Part of this is also a feedback loop. When you have existing powerful minorities who control systems and like them the way they are, then they will add more veto points to the system to protect against future groups being able to change them.
I agree it's part of it. But it is also a lack of trust that a system reliant upon majority rule will protect their interests enough. So several minorities, even the relatively less powerful, may cling to their veto points and specific powers because they fear that's all they can get.
“ Third, if the government can't do anything, why aren't we a libertarian paradise?”
This theme is part of the destructive libertarian propaganda.
Explain?
I think he just read too much into the ‘paradise’ part, as in there is no reason for government to necessarily or relevantly curtail human freedom, especially if you are thinking of ‘positive’ freedoms. Hence the ‘libertarian propaganda’ part.
No, it is the trope "government can't do anything" which aims to undermine the concept of government in a democracy. The goal of a privileged libertarian political minority is to maintain their allowed externalities to the detriment of the general population.
Libertarians have an awful lot to answer for, given that we can't even get 1% of the Presidential vote.
Government has very large principal-agent problems. When working for someone else, the agents do a pretty poor job.
But when they do things for themselves, mainly in the pursuit of easiness, social status or out and out profit, or power, the government is very effective because the agents accrue those benefits and are thus incentivized to maximize them.
The short answer is read Kurt Andersen Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/books/review/kurt-andersen-evil-geniuses.html
You want us to buy your political philosophy but you don't even understand what the word "short" means.
As a physicist, I am not sure to which dimension you refer?
Here is another reference
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/business/dealbook/milton-friedman-free-markets.html
Just to be clear, I wasn't "selling" anything, I was just giving a reference to a point of view.
Here are some more references. When I was born, the world populations was approximately 1.5 Billion individuals and in 2020 ~8 Billion individuals. The UN forecasts ~10 Billion individuals in 2050. According to the CATO Institute: "Libertarians see the individual as the basic unit of social analysis." https://www.cato.org/commentary/key-concepts-libertarianism
However, Mammals are primarily social animals. Consider Jared Diamond's book, The Word Until Yesterday. And then examine https://www.quantamagazine.org/emergence-how-complex-wholes-emerge-from-simple-parts-20181220/
Robert, speaking as a non-libertarian, I think you need to make your arguments a little more engaging than their current "non-sequitur followed by link to book" form.
If I'm judging whether my time would be well spent reading any of the texts you link to, the only thing I really have to go on is my impressions of the person recommending them...
Point well taken. Thanks
You were born in 1919? We hit 2 billion in 1927.
😃 Yes, I should have written 2.5Billion. The point is the basic unit of community social analysis is family/clan/tribe/ and various grouping names or identities as the numbers scale from there.
... that review makes it sound like a paranoid conspiracy theory which believes there's one single evil group that's responsible for everything bad. Just another version of "the Jews are behind everything".
As the review states: “ Now, this is one of those situations where the book is better than the review, so you should read it, but let me give you a sense of the many dimensions” Not sure how you got to your conclusion, but L'Chaim...
When I say it's just another version of "the Jews are behind everything", I don't mean that it blames the Jews. I mean it's just another generation of the same old purity-based conception of community: If we could just get rid of all the pagans / the Christians / the pagans again / the Jews / the Arians / the merchants / the witches / the nobility / the middle class / representational art / the kulaks / the Jews again / the middle class again / the counter-revolutionaries / the racists, then everything would be perfect.
Societies are complex; improving them is complex; everybody makes mistakes; everybody has their share of blame. The idea that all of our biggest problems can be blamed on one group of people is always wrong; is always propaganda (usually in service of the ruling power); and always leads to oppression, and usually bloodshed.
I need to add some provisos to that. There are cases where some group is responsible for the worst of a society's problems, or at least most of some other group's problems.
- In 10th-century Europe, the Vikings really were responsible for a lot of Europe's problems.
- In 13th-century and 17th-century Europe, the Catholic Church really was responsible for a large proportion of Europe's problems.
- In the US south during slavery, slave owners and Southern culture were, in fact, to blame for all of the biggest problems of blacks in America.
- There are families of metaphysical beliefs which I think, taken together, are responsible for most of our problems today. But these families aren't recognized as groups.
While taking note of your additions, your comment is related to the latest Astral Codex post { https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-consequences-of-radical-reform }
Your enumerations are further elaborated in Peter Frankopan's book The Silk Roads { https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/29/silk-roads-peter-frankopan-review } among others.
The fundamental problem though is human evolutionary behavior as understood from studying the great apes such described by Barbara King "Roots of Human Behavior" or Jared Diamond's "The World before yesterday among others.
Although you can clearly see the problem, unfortunately humanity has generations to go before the tribal groups you enumerate don't dominate human reaction to diversity or assigning blame to others.
Of course since the world may soon reach peak Phosphorous, population and societal issues will change dramatically.
{https://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/phosphorus.html }
{ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-02-10/is-a-key-ingredient-humans-need-to-live-about-to-run-short/ }
In the meantime, the endless conflicts will continue.....
Hm, do you mean destructive libertarian in the sense of accelerationist communism? That would certainly be an interesting take on the idea.
Maybe if we're able to add so much regulation to the enforcement of laws, then everything will become unenforceable!
The problem is that we have lots of laws with discretion to enforce: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/06/philosopher-kings-in-blue.html
There is discretion at both the enforcement stage and prosecution stage.
Yeah, one of the things I noted in the comments of the linked post is that William Stuntz' book (which Robin is discussing) emphasizes the enormous amount of discretion given to prosecutors. Robin replied to me that he was lumping police & prosecutors together, and I was doing the same thing without thinking about it here.
When I was young and working at Bell Laboratories all staff were given a tour of a central telephone office. In the basement were the chases piled high with miles of disconnected circuit wires. The linemen were paid for installing circuits but not for removing the old wires no longer being used. Similarly with regulation, very little investment or effort goes into removing those that are no longer relevant or useful. Apparently it is cheaper just to let them be ignored.
Like Google's dead servers in their data centers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
Yeah, that article is a pile of nonsense, but you knew that when you posted the link.
Anyone can register to edit a Wikipedia article. Have a go at it...
That would be a monumental waste of time and you know it. Anyone can register to edit a Wikipedia, only an elite few can have their edits on any remotely controversial article last more than a day, and joining that elite requires an enormous commitment of time and social capital. As always, if you're going to go to Wikipedia for something like this, you read the talk page. Or, in this case, the forty-two archived talk pages full of people saying essentially "that article is a pile of nonsense and I registered to edit it so that it wouldn't be a pile of nonsense, but you all keep turning it back into a pile of nonsense".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Libertarianism
Yes, that was the joke. Wikipedia has armies of trolls and vigilantes protecting whatever labels, falsehoods or disinformation a Wikipedia article has established. Best to go to a real encyclopedia.
If you want to go down a rabbit hole, try Wikipedia Dispute Resolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_requests/ArbCom
Do you mean that many times the "veto" effect is to throw sand in the gears of any efficient governance?
Is the answer to this not "entitlement spending"? There are also veto points in repealing or reducing things. Social Security and Medicare are expensive, and are getting more expensive as the population ages. Even with nothing new, the Government is going to keep getting bigger until you can overcome the veto points involved in changing this. And that is hard.
This seems like one of those times where it's worth insisting on a non-US centric perspective. Plenty of countries don't have anything like the same number of veto points the US has, and do absolutely fine.
Which countries do you have in mind? Western European countries? Developing countries? China? Japan? Korea? Singapore?
Most high GDP nations that I have at least a passing familiarity with seem to have fewer veto points than the US.
Suppose you want to make a bill law in the UK: If you're the government you introduce the bill. The bill is debated and arguments are made. It then almost certainly passes (it's a scandal if a government bill doesn't pass). The house of lords can delay it a bit or make certain kinds of symbolic protests but that's it. You can then be held accountable for it next election.
Suppose you want to make a bill law in America: First you've got to get it through committees- a much harder process than in the Uk. Then you've got to get it through the house. Then you've got to get it through the senate- you either need a non-filibuster, or a 3/5ths majority. Then you need the president not to veto it. Then you need the supreme court not to strike it down.
I'm not hugely engaged in politics but I am from the UK. I don't think it is fair to say that we built our way out of the coronavirus problem.
We had shortages of staff and equipment too. The biggest eduction policy I can remember was increasing university fees.
There has been some high profile rail improvements and a new neclear power plant commissioned. Maybe that couldn't of happened in the US.
During the endless brexit talks one of the only things parliament could agree on was voting no and giving themselves more opportunities to vote no
Many of the other high Gdp countries will be under the super structure of the eu which is famously veto prone.
> . I don't think it is fair to say that we built our way out of the coronavirus problem.
I don't think anyone claimed that the UK was an amazing example of building your way out of the coronavirus problem.
Getting rid of veto points and making it more possible for government to govern and make changes, doesn't guarantee things will go well. I imagine things will go poorly and better much quicker, hopefully evening out to a level of progress that is aligned with the populations viewpoints. Things will go better in the medium to long term. By allowing the Governing party to enact its goals, the people will be able to judge them on what they did or did not accomplish, during the next election cycle. The stronger connection between the governing party and laws getting enacted, the stronger and healthier the feedback loop will be of democracy.
Of course there's lots of problems that interfere, such as disinformation, and polarization in general. An idea Ezra often states is that the current American system which is weighed towards inaction, causes the focus to shifted much more to social issues, such as cancel culture, using peoples preferred pronouns, gay marriage, etc. Politicians try to rile up their bases against the opponent with controversial social issues, instead of doing stuff that they think can make the US better and then being judged on that.
Do you feel that the UK is worse off now, because it does not have an American style 3/5 Veto point in the house of lords? Would it be better or worse in that world?
>Many of the other high Gdp countries will be under the super structure of the eu which is famously veto prone.
I'm not an expert in how the EU works or anything, so i'm genuinly curious on whether the EU is famously veto prone, or not.
From some basic research, it looks like the EU has taken large steps in recent decades (Treaty of Lisbon ) away from unanimity (a Veto system) towards something called Qualified Majority Voting.
There are still items that require unanimity, such as adding a new country to the EU but it seems like that list of topics that can be vetoed has shrunk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_the_Council_of_the_European_Union#Policy_areas
Meanwhile,
It seems like the minority party in the US can with just over 2/5ths of the senate, veto anything and everything that goes through the senate.
The EU is complicated. The first thing to keep in mind is it's not a country, it's a weird hybrid between a federal system and an international organization with no contemporary equivalent. The countries within the EU are mostly parliamentary democracies with fewer nominal veto points than the US - unicameral legislatures means no House/Senate deadlocks, and Parliament-appointed governments mean legislative/executive deadlocks are rarer.
As for whether the EU is veto-prone? In a nominal sense, oh gods yes. Compared to the EU on paper, the US is a utopia of majority rule. The most majoritarian system in the EU is the normal legislative procedure, requiring a proposal by the Comission (executive), a majority in Parliament (legislative, directly elected) and a "qualified majority" in the Council of member state governments (legislative), that being (roughly) a simple majority counted by number of countries and a two-thirds majority counted by population. And that's for, essentially, internal regulatory stuff, within the scope of the competences. ("Enumerated powers" in US-speak.) Anything relating to foreign policy requires governmental unanimity. Any money going into the EU, unanimity. Any form of taxation at the EU level, unanimity at the governmental level as well as all member state legislatures.
As for how it works in practice - under present circumstances it seems like US couldn't function at all at the federal level if these were the sorts of procedures it has to follow, even if it had the same basic powers as it does now (which are much greater than those of the EU), so something must be working better. Crucially, politics in Europe aren't European-ized the way US politics are nationalized, not by far. Politics at the European level are still dominated, on balance, by splits along member states, rather than party lines. National parties do form pan-European alliances for the EU Parliament but hardly anyone could tell you by heart what the groupings are, exactly.
I'm too tired to do a comprehensive analysis or come to a real conclusion. For further comparison, I might mention a few significant items of EU legislation.
The Pandemic Recovery Package - a herculean effort started by Germany dropping its historical red line of shared debt, which then took six months to sort about because vetos from Hungrary and Poland over nominally unrelated, but simultaneous, legislation over stronger human rights conditionality on the EU budget, generally seen as a sort of workaround of Article 7. (The main tool against human rights violations by EU members, which requires - you guessed it - unanimity.) Ultimately resolved Parliament really digging its heels in, the other member states coming up with a credible threat of implementing the Package on a sort of voluntary basis between themselves without Hungrary or Poland, and some concessions, more or less significant ones depending on who you ask.
Sanctions on Belarus and Turkey - An episode in EU foreign relations were everyone wanted to sanction Belarus over the fraudulent elections, but Cyprus wouldn't budge unless it also got sanctions on Turkey. This want on for weeks (a month or two, even?) until Cyprus finally relented in exchange for symbolic concessions. It was all very embarrassing, but I'm not sure if the culprit is Cyprus' refusal to back down for so long, or the other countries' refusal to sanction Turkey, especially given the various escalations since.
Regulation on disclosing corporate taxes - Was introduced at the EU level a few years ago. First there was a blocking minority in the Council, but nobody knew which countries since they don't have to tell anyone. Since this secrecy is a procedural question it could be changed by a simple majority of countries, but the pro-regulation majority refused. Then eventually the voting lists leaked, a couple of national parliaments forced their governments to change their votes to yes, and now Germany is the lone holdout. Germany held the rotating Council presidency for all of last fall, so they simply refused to schedule a vote on it until finally Portugal took over for the spring of 2021. Now it looks on track to pass, but overriding Germany like this is notable for being really really rare.
Brexit itself is a pretty good example of a government being able to push through sweeping change despite only having a small majority. There's no way that happens in the US.
My (very limited) impression is that the government was mostly trying to _stop_ Brexit – not push it through. If anything, Brexit was something popular enough with voters that _they_ pushed it through over the strenuous objections of 'the government'.
I admit that the only British pundits I follow are pretty hard left, but, my impression of modern-day Britain is that it has a fair number of 'atrocities and abuses', at least at the level of poor and minority groups being hurt by government action.
Which would be one thing if those problems were trade-offs for really great growth and prosperity, or something. But if I'm googling correctly, mean annual gdp growth has been about 30% higher in the US than the UK over the last half century, despite our vetocracy problems.
I'd be cautious with UK pundits discussing atrocities: a lot(across the political spectrum) tend to write influenced by what they see as happening in the US. So, to take one example you may have seen, the number of black people shot by the police in the UK is substantially less than one per year. The supporters of Black Life Matters tend to give a different story.
To show balance, it's worth noting how histrionic about culture war themes some conservative commentators on the UK get as well. It's the same issue: express your tribal allegiance through blindly importing the problems of a more prestigious (I assume) political system and therefore present minor concerns as major ones.
Also worth mentioning that the powers of the UK parliament are much greater than those of the US Congress, relatively speaking. Under the US constitution, Congress is limited to its enumerated powers, limited by various constitutionally-encoded rights protections, and the process for amending the constitution is currently politically impossible. Without a codified constitution, under the principle of Parliamentary Sovereignty, the UK Parliament can do basically whatever it wants to, whenever it wants to. No particular rule is protected, except by convention, and courts can't strike down Acts of Parliament because there's no higher authority to appeal to. Even the rules it has historically imposed on itself - like the two-thirds majority for a new election under the Fixed Terms act of 2011 - are in effect like the US Senate filibuster, able to be dispensed with by a simple majority at any time if the simple majority really want to, as was indeed done to force the 2019 special elections.
In the particular case of the pandemic I suppose this hasn't been hugely significant. Congress hasn't been overly encumbered by constitutional limits, and high-profile court cases lost by the government - see New York, for example - were against executive action, and even the UK courts can strike down the actions of the executive.
I'd mostly comment that making a bill law in most parliamentary systems is a tad more complicated, and a tad less complicated than presented here. It's more complicated insofar as there still ar committees and discussion before a bill usually makes it to the floor of the house of commons (aside from private member bills which usually come direct from a singular parliamentarian). And sometimes those committees can be opaque and slow as hell. And then it usually has to go through two or three reading passes before it's finally voted on and formally passed/rejected. Westminster systems still retain a "president" veto slot, though that's the Governor General and that veto is pretty damned rare (the position is primarily ceremonial now, and using that veto is a pretty much guaranteed career ender). And much to most people's surprise, Westminster systems also have a supreme court that can (and does) completely eviscerate laws if they don't pass muster.
But on the flip side, government power is usually rather solidly set on one balance IE who has majority in the house of commons. Which means that the most visible part of passing laws IE committee and voting is managed by whoever holds the majority (either outright or as part of coalition). Which means that on the face of it, most things that get to the floor of the house are either supported by the opposition parties (and are guaranteed to lose but are intended to make a statement), or will pass because one part holds majority. Which means that, generally speaking, bills DO move faster and become law faster.
All of the above?
I agree! In my experience, Germany has its own form of NIMBYism but it rarely succeeds as long as the political mainstream supports the plan (but else, it does succeed, see the wind power plant placing problems at the 'Energiewende', or the 'Mietpreisbremse' in Berlin). It does, however, have a huge amount of regulation causing it to have twice the number of lawyers as its neighbors [1]. For example, 'BER' airport, 'Elbphilharmonie' and 'Stuttgart 21' were delayed as a result of this (see also my top-level comment).
[1]: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/154099/umfrage/anwaltsdichte-ausgewaehlter-laender/
The common underlying cause to polarization and vetocracy here is that we're becoming a lower-trust society, I think. That clearly creates polarization (because siege mentality), and also creates vetocracy (the less you trust the generic group of other people, the higher the odds that a random project of theirs will actually be bad for you, and the more veto power you want over it).
And the second issue you raise at the end - that eliminating vetocracy may actually enable bad things - is also a consequence here, because lower-trust societies are generally not just less trusting, but also less trustworthy, so to a large degree the reduced level of trust is actually rational. The ideal solution would be to increase trust, but that's a Hard Problem.
The trust problem, I think, is rooted in cyclical racism and xenophobia, which we can never seem to permanently put behind us. Enlightenment reasoning showed us the value of mutual aid, to which we still pay a lot of lip service. But when the conditions are ripe, humans have a tendency to gamble on their own inner resources instead of throwing their lot in with the mixed community (because they don't trust that the community, with its diversity of needs, will leave them better off than going it alone).
This survival-of the-fittest mentality boils to the surface when enough people tune into fear-based rhetoric that says the system is horribly unfair to them. (E.g., Red State residents tend to believe they're getting ripped off by the Feds, whereas in reality they routinely benefit quite a bit more from the communal Federal pool than the Blue States who subsidize them.)
The racism/xenophobia often plays out with a civilized veneer: "I would love, love, love to be able to help those in need -- if only it could be done without waste, fraud, and abuse!"
By prioritizing vague notions of economic prudence above real people's needs they are revealing a lack of empathy when it comes to Others. After the West Virginia GOP governor Jim Justice recently pleaded for people to pass a Big Covid relief package, saying, "We need to go big now, and if we waste some money, well, we waste some money," fellow Republicans immediately pushed back with the kneejerk response of, no, we need to figure out how to do it without wasting money!
This would be like Ted Cruz at a house fire, telling the fire crew to stop working until they figured out how to spray without wasting so much water.
Our governments (both federal and local) comprise a huge, huge institution. It's perfectly reasonable to work as hard as possible to minimize waste, fraud, and abuse, but it's an intellectual and moral cop-out to use waste, fraud, and abuse as an excuse for blocking all spending for communal benefit (which these days has even become a kneejerk blocking of basic infrastructure spending). Just look at how willing Republicans are to spend, spend, spend when it's NOT spending for the benefit of those Others who they have deemed too week or lazy to keep up.
>The trust problem, I think, is rooted in cyclical racism and xenophobia, which we can never seem to permanently put behind us.
Your people blame racism and xenophobia, I blame the fact that every time my people say "hey, I see what you're trying to do there, but I don't think that'll work the way you intend it to" you accuse them of racism and xenophobia.
But this exact kind of "no u" infighting is the problem. We've managed to get ourselves in a defect-defect equilibrium, where instead of righties and lefties debating issues, one side proposes something, the other attacks it, and we just stand around calling each other authoritarian communists and neo-nazis and never actually help anyone.
I realize the following will not satisfy your objections in the least.
But we are in a Hannah Arendt Banality of Evil period -- when some of us are recognizing the moral failure of others who are suffering from a lack of imagination (as in shrugging off the former president's profoundly malignant anti-democratic actions and words with a snicker -- "That's just Trump being Trump"). No. That's just Trump being evil, as his supporters (and excusers) fail to see that this is precisely how oppression emerges. Hitler, too, was just being silly old Hitler until he was given the power to take his malignancy to its logical conclusion.
My point it that I reject the false equivalencies that abound among today's GOP (I won't indict "conservatives writ large, because I believe they are helpful to a balanced, healthy democracy.) Simply put, Democrats and liberals are not the same species as today's Republicans that refuse to even being to try to stamp out the evil represented by Trumpism.
Sometimes in history we have no choice but to call out the malignant ignorance of "the other side." "Righties and Lefties" are not currently all fighting for the same team (democracy). The reason? Today's Righties have developed a militant deficiency of empathy -- and it's too serious to be glossed over with, "We ALL need to stop blaming each other." No. Not until the Right begins to honestly accept responsibility for trying to drown our entire democracy in a bathtub, ignoring the suffering and oppression of Others with the tired defense that everyone else is proposing bad ideas. Let's not forget, for example, how many times they tried to kill healthcare reform with absolutely NO alternatives offered.
On a very mundane level, they simply cannot be bothered to care.
You're conflating a whole bunch of different concerns here. Trump was bad, sure, but that says nothing about whether welfare anti-fraud regulations are racist.
Given the fact that there was no evidence of significant welfare fraud in the first place, that faked-up stories of (black) "welfare queens" who didn't exist were used to sell the "anti-fraud" regulations, and that the "anti-fraud" regulations actually cost more than the estimated sum total of all welfare fraud, yes, the welfare anti-fraud regulations implemented by Reagan and G W Bush were racist.
Facts matter.
>Let's not forget, for example, how many times they tried to kill healthcare reform with absolutely NO alternatives offered.
Well, I'm gonna single that out because it only takes a couple seconds on Google to prove it isn't true:
https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/23/politics/collins-cassidy-obamacare-repeal/
The Republican party was proposing alternatives to the ACA throughout the entire Obama administration, the media just didn't tell you about them.
If you genuinely believe Trump was a Hitler wannabe, there's nothing I can say that will convince you otherwise. But don't you think it's a little bit odd that every time you make that accusation, the response is never "you're damn right he is, that's exactly what we want," the response is "no he isn't, you've lost your damn mind?" The guy was a master of making statements that sound utterly mundane if you read them charitably and horrific if you read the worst possible interpretation in to them, thereby making it impossible for his supporters and opponents to communicate.
People voted for him because he promised to solve their problems, just like people vote for left-wing politicians because they promise to solve their problems. _You_ need to stop listening to corporations whose business model relies on keeping you terrified and hateful of your neighbors.
Interesting backstory on the rise of Trump (in the New Yorker a few years back if memory serves): Bannon and Luntz kept discovering a very interesting phenomenon rising quietly in the polls over several years, and it really had little to do with policy positions and everything to do with people yearning for a "strongman" (no, not a strong man, but a Putin type authoritarian). And this polling is what convinced Bannon and his crowd that someone like Trump might actually be viable for the first time in so and so many years.
So that -- combined with what I've been seeing with my own eyes -- makes me disagree with your premise that people didn't actually want the worst of what Trump had/has to offer. Maybe some tell themselves they don't, but his clearly coded speech, backed up by his non-coded speech, and his non-coded actions just can't be ignored by people of honesty and good will.
Trump himself is not the issue. He's just a symptom of a critical mass of people who decided they were fed up enough with our democracy (too incrementalistic / too socialistic / too whatever) that it was time to take shortcuts, as in the hysterical Flight 93 doctrine popular among conservative intellectuals who wanted to justify their support for Trump.
You don't have to "believe" in anti-democratic trends, racism, and xenophobia in order to excuse, enable, and ally with those who do. And any informed person who pretends this isn't what's been going on is simply gaslighting the rest of us.
And how many gleeful/hopeful comments have I seen yearning over Biden as the liberal/left strongman? I don't think he's anywhere approaching to anything like that, he's a career politician and probably a mushy centrist (which is now a term of opprobium).
But the amount of people having fever-dreams over what he's going to do when in office, and recounting the first days executive orders, and all the magic pixie-dust that will be sprinkled to solve all the problems now you have a "real human as president for the first time in four years" (direct quote from someone I know online) - yeah, populist yearning is not a one-side element.
You know what? You lost my sympathy with a very simple stroke - capital-O "Others". I've read "The Stranger" and "The Outsider", we're all up on our theory.
"Other/Others" don't exist. Talking about "others" means something. Trying to put people into special categories so they can then be put into theoretical boxes and have labels of merit attached is wearisome and I'm fed-up with it. Say that "Republicans don't care about anyone but themselves" if that's your honest view of the matter but for the love of God don't start talking about "Others". It's the left-equivalent of HBD not as "human biodiversity means that people are different (but they're still all humans with the rights of humans)" but "HBD is a euphemism for scientific racism". Well, "Others" is a euphemism for sociological racism, and it's not any the better for that. The only difference between "HBD" and "Others" is in the contents of what box are being patted on the head as Superior.
Honestly, I have no interest in courting your sympathy. My purpose is purely to indict.
Any half-informed person who still identifies with today's GOP has relinquished any claim to seriousness when it comes to participating in honest, civil discourse. I say this without hyperbole. The damage to culture, democracy, diversity, science, and reason-based interchange of ideas has simply been too extraordinary to excuse.
I, for one, will not be gaslighted by those who still insist on clinging to the pretense that their collective behavior has been within the bounds of constructive participation in modern collective society. As long as they refuse to admit the damage and re-commit to honest engagement they can have no role in rebuilding, as they are demonstrably still committed to "tearing it all down" -- which may be a legitimate philosophical (anarchic) stance, but it is antithetical to the American project, whose burden of upkeep we all share as citizens.
They need to be relegated back to the shadows where bigots and nihilists had been dwelling before Trump et al encouraged them to come out and party. Those who continue to think "socialism" or whatever is giving them permission to cynically throw out the rules have zero to offer at the present time. When they wake up (hello Nicole Wallace) they will be embraced, and their honest ideas will be heard.
I get it, you are Emile Zola and this is your "J'Accuse!" Well, Zola was right in the Dreyfuss case.
But it's not my sympathy you need to court, it's my conviction. And this discourse around "the Other" and "Othering" is its own sickly, saccharine form of Orientalisation and The Noble Savage from the liberal-to-progressive side.
Stop telling me that X is *so* different from me that I couldn't possibly understand their lived experience. Tell me that X is being treated like shit and I'll want to help do something to fix that. Tell me that X is an exotic zoo specimen and why should I care, I have my own problems?
I also like the fashion in which you are doing your own form of Othering - those dreadful awful people who are bigots and anti-democracy who should be relegated to the shadows from whence they skulked.
"Any half-informed person who still identifies with today's GOP has relinquished any claim to seriousness when it comes to participating in honest, civil discourse. I say this without hyperbole."
You do realise that to engage in discourse requires giving up some control of what can be discussed? Discourse by your rules only is not possible.
I don't understand what you are seeking to do on this site, but it seems you are unwilling to allow the basic humanist courtesy of allowing your opponent an opinion. I doubt you are going to do more than reinforce the view that there is a certain type of progressive thinker who has the arrogance to believe their views are correct and everyone else is at least wrong and perhaps evil. If your aim is to be the secular version of that irritating born-again Christian stereotype, then feel free. It seems a waste of your thoughts to me though, as everyone has something interesting to say.
Those are some reasons why your side doesn't trust the other side. Can you think of any valid (or close to valid) reasons the other side doesn't trust your side?
I think some of the stereotypical character differences between conservative and liberals are rooted at least vaguely in actuality. (E.g., conservatives tend to be more defense oriented, whereas liberals tend toward expansiveness.) In my ideal village we'd have a balance of such characters. Some people naturally gravitate toward security and conservation while others toward exploration and new ideas about humanity and society. Authoritarianism seeks to destroy that balance.
So I can certainly empathize with, say, the fears of others who believe liberals will undermine their security or stability in some manner. The current problem is rooted in the Republican realization that they could just say NO to every damn thing -- and the people at large would place the blame, not on them particularly, but generally on government, which of course reinforces the conservative position of minimizing all government action anyway. The demagogues -- the anti-democratic Steve Bannons -- have crept in meanwhile to weaponize politics to their individual, cynical advantage. Republicans willing to turn a blind eye to the rampant racism and sadism are complicit. What's most remarkable about this period is how few have been willing to put themselves at risk by denouncing this trend.
So, while I can empathize on a personal level with a conservative's fears, we now find ourselves in a willfully broken system that cannot begin to repair itself until the Right starts to renounce its reliance on lies, demonization of almost all action, and the rejection of reason, science, and facts -- which have been the world's common currency since the beginning of the Enlightenment, but which today's conservatives eagerly attempt to devalue on a daily basis.
Part of the reason for the vetocracy is the idea that unless closely monitored the government will discriminate, thus there needs to be lots of community involvement.
And who would the government be so interested in discriminating against, with all its checks and balances?
The noteworthy thing about government (our government anyway) is that it is ostensibly entirely devoted to the welfare of the people. This is not the case with General Motors or Amazon or Wells Fargo. But why are so many people so quick to agree with Reagan's unhelpful witticism about the scariest thing in the world being government saying it wants to help? Why do so many people trust their insurance companies (!) more than government-supported healthcare?
Because government is big, impersonal, and, of course, imperfect, with plenty of waste, fraud, and abuse for demagogues to point at, it has become our whipping boy. (Just listen to the anti-IRS tax avoidance ads on TV now -- portraying our imperfect system of collective burden/investment as a monster that should be destroyed.)
Constitutionally we have a very conservative system -- whereby progress is often delayed beyond the tolerable. As a result of our three branches Reconstruction took 100 years, and now many are yet again balking at the effort!
Just think about what was the catalyst for today's Trump-led charge toward totalitarianism: Obama managed to pass a healthcare bill that was based on free-market conservative principles. Yet, the Right managed to work itself up into such a lather that they proclaimed we would literally lose our country if we didn't set aside democracy in order to save it. They turned ordinary change and meager progress into the ultimate battle of civilization. But it's all a lie. Imperfect as it is, government IS here to help. It simply has no other raison d'état. Yet conservatives snicker when told we ARE the government -- because they believe their interests are furthered when government comes to a standstill or is deprecated in any way.
The upside for having a slow-moving democracy is that, thanks to our founders, it is relatively difficult to systemically subvert. Authoritarian efforts at subversion can only succeed after they convince a majority that "we the people" has little to do with our collective needs and institutions, but refers more to anarchic libertarianism.
The world you've conjured up is a bizarre one. there are many factual differences between it and the real world, like the notion that a healthcare plan based on something written by the massachusetts legislature and passed without a single republican vote (over the objection of many democrats), is based on free market principles.
But the more fascinating thing to me is your picture of the government as a whole, which as you describe it, is utterly dominated by racism xenophobia, and sadism, is obsessed with saving money, is constantly sabotaged, is on the verge of totalitarianism, and yet, IS HERE TO HELP, and should be given more money and more power. Truly it boggles the mind how you can maintain so many contradictory ideas at once.
> raison d'état
I'll copy that.
"The noteworthy thing about government (our government anyway) is that it is ostensibly entirely devoted to the welfare of the people. "
"Ostensibly". It's good that you are at least self-aware enough to include the qualifier. But for someone who talks about how the great problem of the age is that the Evil Republicans are "rejecting reason, science, and facts", you're skipping right past the crucial fact that the government is only *ostensibly* devoted to the welfare of the people, but is *really* devoted to something else. Saying that the government is here to help, is as big a lie as any other.
The government is here to help *itself*. Sometimes the incentives align so that the government can best help itself by helping the suffering and oppressed. But then, quite often the incentives align so that Wal-Mart and Amazon can best help their owners become filthy rich by also helping the poor obtain a wide variety of consumer goods at low cost. The difference is, everybody accepts that Wal-Mart and Amazon are doing this for selfish reasons, but some of us deliberately blind ourselves to the fact that the government is doing the same thing. And blinding yourself to that, throwing out a passing "ostensibly" so you can claim you recognize the problem but then ignoring it, makes it far less likely that you'll actually get the incentives lined up in the right direction.
The only way to personify "government" is as "we the people." Your vision of government sounds more like Mitt Romney's "corporations are people too. "
The idea of a government "here to help itself" is not just sloppy, charged rhetoric, it is a fantastical caricature belonging to a tired rightwing political cartoon. Insisting that government is an entity somehow "really devoted to something else" would be utterly nonsensical except that it predictably supports today's conspiracy-minded authoritarian wannabes who, in more healthy times, would be the humble, loyal opposition -- but that would indicate they still cared about democracy.
> "The only way to personify "government" is as "we the people."
No, it's a particular group of people, with its own interests. Or do you not count the right as people? Because otherwise your theory of government seems to preclude the existence of the republicans as you describe them. Of course, that's not even getting into the more basic prol
> Insisting that government is an entity somehow "really devoted to something else" would be utterly nonsensical except that it predictably supports today's conspiracy-minded authoritarian wannabes who, in more healthy times, would be the humble, loyal opposition -- but that would indicate they still cared about democracy.
Wait, so which is it? is it the cartoon or the reality? you seem to be claiming it's both. In reality, of course, people do not magically become selfless once they enter government service, and your apparent belief that they do (unless they're republicans) does you little credit.
From where I stand, it's your "the government is We the People" that seems most analogous to Mitt Romney's "corporations are people too". Except, Romney never claimed a corporation was *all* the people, and if pressed I'm pretty sure he'd have agreed that the people who do make up a corporation are unequally represented in their interests.
Governments and corporations are both made up of a subset of the population, represent the interests of a subset of the population, and represent those interests unequally. This is an absolute fact, that anyone who prides themselves on being part of the fact-based party or tribe needs to accept. The government should, and *maybe* does, represent a broader subset of the population than does any one corporation. But if all you can do is spout silly fantasies about how the government represents all the people equally, then no way are you noticing how the people who actually run the government are privileging some interests above others.
Or you'll notice it only when it's the other party that does it, where really both parties do it and the nonpartisan bureaucrats do it most. Corporations, I trust that you and I both will recognize are representing only a subset of the people's interests, and that makes it easier to keep them in line.
Racism and xenophobia has decreased enormously from where it was in the 1950s.
So that can't be the problem.
One explanation: vetocracy entrenches the status quo. There are always powerful elements within the status quo who fight to keep it intact. As the hegemonic corporate and governmental forces in the US become stronger, so too do their efforts to keep the status quo in place. They sometimes claim to do this in the name of preventing bad things, but in reality, they want to prevent new things.
This seems simpler than assuming it's an unintended consequence of actually trying to protect vulnerable people. After all, the powerless lack power; the powerful do not. It's usually a better bet to think that the powerful have had greater influence in bringing about a particular state of affairs, especially when that state of affairs keeps them in power.
I think you're onto something here.
Can we tell a story that says, "as society gets wealthier, veto points proliferate because they're seen as a way to prevent backsliding?" We can argue whether these veto points actually work to maintain the (wealthy) status quo, but in general people are more afraid of losing what they have than gaining what they might.
I can see this in large corporations: there is a lot of lip service paid to innovation, but most effort goes into keeping the money train running.
>in general people are more afraid of losing what they have than gaining what they might.
Well, that makes sense. I'm not at all afraid of gain.
(Just kidding — I know what you mean.)
I'm still learning to live without an edit button!
Don't accept the backsliding!
Come to DSL, we have an edit button!
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/board,1.0.html
"in general people are more afraid of losing what they have than gaining what they might"
This dynamic is surely at the heart of the administrative creep that we're calling 'vetocracy'. Early career work by Danial Kahneman Amos Tversky squarely identified the fear of loss factor as a much stronger motivation.
I don't think it's just hegemonic corporate and governmental forces that want to maintain the status quo, though. I see it play out at a much smaller, even individual-choice level.
We (in the US) still live in a country with a consumer-driven market and democratic elections. If there were enough demand to build, disrupt, innovate, and create, then I think we'd see hegemonic corporations and governments trying to deliver, albeit while trying to ensure *they* are the ones doing the building, etc.
As it stands, I think a lot of people are actually demanding something akin to the status quo. Maybe it's the cumulative effect of lots of small groups trying to protect their own narrow interests, but I can't help but feel like there's something deeper at play. It seems too pervasive throughout culture.
As more people have a better and better basic quality of life, they become more worried about the potential of any change to disrupt that.
That might contribute, but I think it's more than that.
Why didn't progress drastically slow down right after the invention of the steam engine? Or the internal combustion engine? Or electricity? Or vaccines? Or home refrigeration? Or...?
It seems like people used to be pretty optimistic about change, despite having seen *bigger* relative improvements in their lifetimes, and so presumably being more aware of what they stand to lose.
Has the marginal value of change decreased? I guess that's the Great Stagnation argument.
That makes some sense to me in sectors where progress is a little easier to objectively define, and the costs are increasing in real terms.
But it seems like the same dynamic is at play in more trivial and subjective sectors, as well. Take fashion. I'm about as far from an expert as you can get, but it sure seems like trends have been recycled for the last 20 years or so, maybe longer. I think we've circled back to the 1980s right now (*shudder*). But at least in the 1980s this stuff was /new/.
It's not at all clear to me why the benefit of adopting a new fashion trend (differentiating yourself from those around you, and presumably from those who came before) should have gotten closer to the cost of adopting a new fashion trend (it doesn't catch on, 20 years from now you look like a dork in all your pictures).
I find it hard to believe that we've exhausted human creativity, whether it's in the form of something genuinely new or just substantial permutations on what's been done before.
You know what it is? Nostalgia. We're not just trying to protect what we have, we're trying to go back to what we think we've lost.
I would posit that it is how we determine the marginal value of investment and accretion of returns that has changed.
Are we better off investing $25 billion in Acela and putting $75 billion into LA to Seattle; or, $100 billion to just replace Acela, no one else gets anything? (Yes, we could adopt MMT and do everything. Though I have a feeling we won’t get very far down the list.) And in either case, why would the Senate, skewed towards the states not being invested in, invest? Other than as trade-offs for piddling earmarks that bring no real LT returns to Omaha?
It seems self-defeating, but it is rational game theory when seeking re-election locally.
“ Everybody heard about the Obama administration's supposedly-bad decision to fund Solyndra.”
The government didn’t fund Solyndra. Solyndra in 2009 was part of a $40B DOE loan guarantee program.
https://www.energy.gov/ig/downloads/special-report-11-0078-i
That is a difference without a distinction.
You say that, but my bank would you rather give me a $100,000 loan than a gift
If there's a loan guarantee and the business fails, then the government has basically gifted that money to the business.
Even if it succeeds, the business has been given a huge reduction in interest rates. Compare the rates on treasury debt with those on junk bonds.
If someone buys a stock and the price goes down, then they basically gave a gift to the company.
Yes, investments have risks. It's still dishonest to represent them as grants when they fail.
That just means the government funded it's creditors after it went broke. People always fall for the fallacy that a mere "guarantee" doesn't cost anything.
It means it's not officially on the budget, right?
The distinction is important because as it is phrased it sounds like the government giving money to a company and getting nothing back. Whereas with a loan program most of the loans are paid back, and the existence of the loans means that the companies keep running, paying employees, etc. so paying more taxes in the long run and stimulating the economy. So the government is often making a net gain
"Still, isn't it kind of contradictory to say the government can't do anything, and then blame regulations? Shouldn't this be a self-limiting problem?"
Most regulations originate from authority delegated to independent agencies such as the FDA, FCC, FTC, etc, etc, etc... They often have a lot of latitude to say "you can't do X" in their area of influence, but they can't appropriate funds and start a big infrastructure project without new legislation.
Yeah, I came here to comment this. There's no contradiction between an excess of *regulation*, and being unable to allocate money via *legislation*.
> Still, isn't it kind of contradictory to say the government can't do anything, and then blame regulations? Shouldn't this be a self-limiting problem? Don't we eventually reach the point where the government can't implement more regulations on itself, and then disappears in a puff of logic?
No, right? Surely any theory of how regulations slow things down hinges on accretion. If the government can't navigate the N regulations it's already passed in order to pass the N+1th... the first N are still there!
If even the private sector is experiencing this issue, wouldn't that point to the veto ratchet theory? It seems that in say 1850, a large public works project that displaced hundreds of people in a poor neighborhood would be a lot easier to pull off than now, and not just because of political will. Or maybe the only reason it would get noticed is that there's a party big enough that will take notice and try to stop it?
And as you mentioned, I'm not sure polarization and vetocracy are exactly the same. It might be that polarization leads to vetocracy, if for no other reason than to stymie the other side, but it's very easy to imagine a stuck system even with sides that get along. Klein talks about there being stagnation for the 20 years he's covered Congress, but it seems that polarization wasn't nearly as bad then as it is now.
> If even the private sector is experiencing this issue, wouldn't that point to the veto ratchet theory?
Klein's "vetocracy" isn't confined to literal vetos. Even in private organizations, oftentimes one employee or one department can put the kibbosh on a project they don't approve of. This can happen on a small scale, like the one Impossible Coworker digging in their heels over a carpeting redesign because all colors and styles other than the current one give them a headache, or an enterprise scale, which often manifests as "our department's head doesn't like your department's head and your department's head proposed this idea, so even though objectively it's a great idea, office politics dictates that we put up whatever roadblocks are afforded by our department's position within the company" - see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDXKAwzdxn4
"The US could be building our way out of the housing crisis and the climate crisis. We could be building a better education system, more advanced infrastructure. We could have more and better factories, supersonic aircraft, delivery drones, flying cars [...]"
I love this blog. But if it has one weak point it's economics. First of all, you can't start with the premise that having the government "build stuff" is better than not. You have to figure out why the marginal benefit is supposedly worth the marginal cost before you bemoan the lack of spending. A tip-off to this sloppy thinking is the sloppy use of language in talking about "building" a better "education system" as if that was a form of lasting infrastructure and not money down a rathole of special interests like teachers unions. Once Klein can make a case that "more government stuff" is a good thig we can talk about whether it's a bad thing that we don't have "more government stuff." But Klein is completely ignorant of economics. He is just a stopped-clock on the left who takes it as an article of faith that more government spending is always a good idea.
Klein apparently wants more stuff like the latest NYC subway expansion, which is surely a bargain at a mere $2.5-3.7 Billion per mile.
https://www.marketplace.org/2019/04/11/subways-us-expensive-cost-comparison/ Or California's $80-billion "high-speed" rail that may someday travel almost as fast as a car between downtown Modesto and Fresno. https://reason.com/2020/06/23/even-the-coronavirus-might-not-be-able-to-kill-californias-bullet-train-boondoggle/
Where was the vetocracy when we needed it for those projects?
Part of the vetocracy at the local level is imposing extra costs. These projects are expensive, in part, because so many groups get a say in the decisions. Asking where was the vetocracy when we need it is backwards -- the vetocracy was there, it just didn't entirely kill the projects.
The NYC subway expansion arguably *was* a victim of vetocracy. The expansion was originally planned to be larger and done sooner. NYC really needs to invest in both upgrading its existing subway (there's a ridiculously expensive signal upgrade going on now too, and it should've been done decades ago) and expanding it, and the progress has been frustratingly slow for everyone. Though I haven't followed all the politics, I know one factor that illustrates the vetocracy: to upgrade, you have to close the subway occasionally, but that would be unfair to night-shift workers, so it doesn't get done. (Incidentally, covid has given them leeway to close the subway at night now.)
The marginal cost vs marginal benefit is definitely a thing, and I'd argue "vetocracy" shares a lot of underlying causes with "cost disease". E.g. excessive regulations contribute to both. Scott has written interesting articles on cost disease before, might be worth searching for it if you're interested.
Because of the vetocracy California high speed rail has morphed from something that could be very useful to a incredibly expensive way to connect two small towns no one wants to go to. The vetocracy doesn't just say no, even when it says yes it makes the process so long and expensive that nothing is worth doing.
Yeah, really. If California HSR could be built under 1950s rules, it'd be eminently worthwhile. Probably $10-20B in today's dollars for the full route from SF/Sacramento to SD.
But the flip side is that if it'd happened then, you'd probably have a couple dozen more construction workers die in the process, probably a worse traffic snarl during construction(albeit, also a shorter construction period), the workers getting lower pay and benefits, and probably a poor neighbourhood somewhere getting bulldozed. Is that worth saving a hundred billion dollars? TBH I think it would be, but I can understand why some people don't like that conclusion.
I don't think the claim is "you literally cannot build anything", the claim is "building things has become so hard that it takes vast amounts of money".
Fair enough. But I would say it's a bit always easy to just say the "government should be smarter." Making it so is the trick because the incentive structure is never there. Incentives are everything. For example, compare the engineering achievements of profit-motivated SpaceX to the politically motivated decision making of NASA that produced the Space Shuttle. There is no comparison in terms of efficiency.
SpaceX is an interesting example there because Elon Musk has explicitly made it not profit motivated. He's talked before about how he doesn't want to make it a public company because he has personal goals for the company (such as developing a colony on Mars) that don't have any profit motive. He has a limited budget to do so (though much less so now that he can funnel money in from his Tesla stock), and the various investors will want some eventual return (but that can be a very long ways off), but profit is not the primary motivation for either the heads of the company or must of the workforce.
I guess he can't help making money in spite of himself, then. They just did a small stock sale at a valuation that would make SpaceX worth about $75 billion. But I am sure he knows profits will only help him get to Mars, even if that is his real objective. In any event, he knows he's spending his own money so he has every incentive to be efficient in how he gets to his goal.
There's your cost disease in action. We spend more now on failed efforts than we used to spend on successful ones.
Building things takes money but not vast amounts. Building things takes an individual with an idea and vast amounts of energy, a capacity for massive amounts of obsessive work and inhuman persistence in the face of obstacles to make the thing real. I know because we are Building a Thing (otherwise known as a startup.)
A Thing can't be theorized or legislated into existence. Societies don't build Things. Governments don't build Things. It takes a person, a unique type of individual, to visualize a Thing, especially a New Thing, and cause it to exist.
Our idea was simple, a response to the pandemic and the Mask Wars. What if you could kill virus before you breathed it? What if you had clean air with you all the time? You could go anywhere, fly places even. If some people didn't want to wear masks or stay home when they were sick, that would be their problem not ours. Now, many months later, we have Alpha Thing, Beta Thing is close, we've got 20k worth of lab testing so we know the science works, and so far we've bootstrapped the whole thing. Next step we need money but not vast amounts, not yet really. From where I sit in this venture, what would have boosted us along faster would have been if we could have gotten a few more hands on deck earlier but that's tricky, you have to be really careful not to get the wrong hands on deck.
Now, what we've learned from our startup is that ideas are worthless Everyone has them! Good ones even! What gives an idea worth is the individual that makes it happen, that one person with the right combination of skills and personal traits has an idea and wills it into existence. That is rare and money can't make it happen. Money is super handy later in the process though.
Whatever obstacles stand in the way of those individuals who Build Things are where the problem is.
In order to tie "building things has become so hard that it takes vast amounts of money" to vetocracy’s blocking things, don’t we need to think about inserting “of other people’s money”?
I’m not protesting taxes, I’m addressing the distribution of investment, the MB of spending, the velocity of the money spent, the spillover benefits gained. Some trolley systems in the Midwest as part of a bill funding a brand new hi-speed rail for the NEC aren’t equivalent. Or, in current terms, they aren’t equitable as to equality of outcomes.
Could it be that the slow walk is, in part, a queuing process for funding, waiting for a Buttigieg, and control of the budget, to champion another upgrade to the NEC’s hi-speed train line? It seems that once the stars align, groups, suits, deeply held objections are quite often addressed, funding and construction begin. Almost always this is accompanied by programs funding the plaintiffs’ concerns.
The Democrats say, “Yes!”, the Republicans say, “No!”. The Democrats can wait until the ‘ayes’ have it. What they can’t allow is for Grey Tribe rationalists to say, “Yes, but....” And that I think is what is in part behind the NYT’s concern with Rationalism should it become a force in the Public debate, within the Party.
Democrats have opposed Game Theory, a real world application of Rationalism, ever since Moynihan tried to inject it into the Great Society.
No, if you try to build things with your own money, you still have to deal with the vetocracy. Try building high-density housing in the Bay Area if you doubt this.
From time to time people will find an area where the vetocrats haven't fully entrenched their position because the area wasn't seen as worth bothering to regulate, and build great and mighty works by their own effort with their own money. Consumer electronics and software, ride-share services which totally aren't taxis, online retail, space flight. Sometimes they'll even have the help of the first generation of regulators in the field, who see being able to weakly regulate something big and important as a better career move than having a stranglehold over something they've strangled in the crib.
But in mature industries, including most forms of construction and transportation, the veotocrats can block private spending almost as thoroughly as they do public spending.
Klein and Yglesias are of the opinion that building things cost way too much in the US and that the US should focus more on bringing down the cost of infrastructure. Both of them have written a lot about how it's criminal that everything costs this much per mile. They are not "all government spending is good"
Ok. But wishing things cost less isn't very useful, by itself. I've never thought of Vox as an advocate for deregulating anything, but if that's what they advocate, then more power to them.
In the linked article, Klein discusses all the reasons things cost too much, and tries to figure out ways to change that. That's definitely useful.
Yglesias’s biggest hobby horse is that there should be less regulations/zoning restrictions on the rights of private land owners to build things. It’s less of Klein’s focus, but based on his recent articles he seems to agree.
Suggest repealing NEPA to Klein and see what happens. Complaining about astronomically high costs of building infrastructure and defending environmental reviews is a pure hypocrisy.
Here is a recent Klein column complaining about the CEQA environmental review restricting home building, which is what I was referring to.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opinion/california-san-francisco-schools.html
Those projects are expensive and behind schedule because of all the veto points. If we had a system where voters approved the project and there was no ability to sue those projects would be complete already and under budget.
Oh the track goes right through downtown Palo Alto? Too bad, so sad. Nothing we can do. The voters have spoken.
I think the argument would be that those things are expensive failures precisely because of vetocracy, all the additional regulations that have to be followed and delays that are imposed.
I know a few people who work on government projects, and this is certainly the impression I get - following the rules and changes imposed from above massively balloon the time, scope, and cost of everything.
Klein, and many discussing vetocracy, fail to address distribution of ‘build stuff’.
The NEC wants a $100 billion dollar (the cost will easily double) hi-speed replacement for Acela. All our building is poured into the NEC, creating hi-velocity spending with tremendous spillover and then we’re told this is justified because the area is hi growth.
There is no incentive, in the Senate, to fund a $125 billion Manhattan Seawall, a $40 billion LI Barrier, the $46 billion MTA signal upgrade, the $100 billion hi-speed.... These costs are all estimates that are surely going to ballon. So, we have a city/strip wanting half a trillion assigned just to their local projects.
Yes, there can be an argument made about GDP generated; but, 80+% of that generation stays within the region.
This is a prime reason for the drive to delegitimize, modify the Senate, eliminate the filibuster.
We’ve stopped building because many are tired of building the NEC, while listening to the Swamp wonder how to rejuvenate the interior. I’m all for a large infrastructure package as long as the first $1 trillion is spent between the Appalachians and Rockies.
There’s your vetocracy.
If it's preventing things I like, it's vetocracy. If it's preventing things I don't like, it's a healthy system of checks and balances.
Don't blame me, I don't make the rules.
Yes, people use vetocracy as part of their motivated reasoning. And there's the deeper intractable problem of knowing What's Really Good.
But would you agree that the easier it is for anyone to prevent things (independent of their merits, from any point of view), the more ungovernable a country becomes, and that this is a net bad?
I think there is certainly a threshold beyond which there are too many veto points, yes. And I also think that in certain aspects of American life (usually public but also private) there is definitely a vetocracy at work. The problem is that what constitutes vetocracy run amok (which we must address) is always going to simply be an expression of somebody's priors. I think the lack of infrastructure spending is legitimately an example of vetocracy at work - but of course, I'm in favor of significantly more public investment in general. If I wasn't, I wouldn't feel that way.
"The problem is that what constitutes vetocracy run amok (which we must address) is always going to simply be an expression of somebody's priors." For sure. Identifying any one instance of vetocracy will just reflect the biases of identifier.
And it's also objectively true that the US has more veto points than its peers, and that this generally advantages people who don't want things to change - Conservatives and small-c conservatives, which turns out to be most Americans.
Is it about "things" but about laws, regulations, etc? Most changes in people's lives have been about tech and the private sector, and those are generally slowed down by more regulations and laws.
I think it's more likely that there exists some ideal amount of veto power that is higher than zero but less than the maximum possible amount.
Whether it is net good or bad (on the margins) depends on the case, and I don't even think "net bad" is a good default position.
Exactly this. There has been an increasing push for the involvement of environmental justice groups, and giving other "marginalized groups" a seat at the table among liberals in the last 10-20 years. Obviously another major veto point / coordination issue, but I would be shocked to see progressives complain about it.
Sure, but if it's preventing things that *everyone* likes, then the case for calling it 'vetocracy' is much stronger than the case for calling it 'a healthy system of checks and balances.'
Right?
Like, I acknowledge there are two sides to every argument, of course. But that doesn't mean it's impossible for one side to have a stronger case or more evidence, especially with regards to one specific example.
I feel like most Americans would have been happy with a faster Coronavirus vaccine roll-out. If I have to choose between calling the things that prevented that 'vetocracy' or 'healthy checks and balances', I don't think the difference is 'just a matter of perspective' or w/e.
The issue is that the things that "everyone" likes, they may like in the abstract, while the projects under discussion will have winners in losers in the real world.
To build an efficient transit network, you have to push some peoples' houses flat. Even if they may like the idea of the transit network, they're going to object to this exact plan. And if they have a veto point, use it to prevent the plan from going forward and forcing a redesign. Except that the people who live on the line denoted by "Plan B" can *also* do this, and so on.
This is a very good point. See, for example, the resistance to wind farms on the part of very many progressives who are generally very receptive to carbon-lowering initiatives.
I always think of Hanson's 'near-far' distinction – "carbon-lowering" is abstract and thus considered in 'far' mode, whereas a wind farm marring _my_ view of the ocean is very very much a product of a 'near' mode.
Sure, all policies have some type of tradeoff, but that doesn't mean all policies are zero-sum. In fact, almost none will be precisely zero-sum; some will be highly negative-sum, some will be highly positive-sum, and the rest will be in between.
If a system routinely prevents popular, highly positive-sum things from happening, I think it's fair to use pejoratives to describe that system, in this case 'vetocracy.' Again, see slow Coronavirus vaccine roll-out.
According to Our World in Data, the US has administered 18 doses per 100 people, higher than almost every major developed country. Canada is at 4; France at 5; Germany at 6. Among Western countries, only the UK is higher, at 26.
One way of looking at this might be that in the past, what economists call "potential Pareto improvements" (the winners gain by enough that they can afford to compensate the losers), could remain "potential" and the actual compensation didn't need to be paid. Today, the losers can insist on getting paid off (due to media shifts and to the range of veto points embedded in law and court decisions), and the dissension this creates among the coalition of winners (who gain by different amounts themselves) then prevents the needed bribery of the losers from taking place.
I think this (and many of the broader challenges) derive from the reality that our society is now so incredibly rich, we have no urgency or really any need to do anything effectively, because even if we are incredibly inefficient and suboptimal, we are still "rich" enough. If somehow our GDP were to be cut by a third - and our decisions/systems started to actually matter, I suspect we would be much more effective at dealing with these issues.
There's an interesting parallel with software bloat. The amount of resources that it took to run well built software from the 80s is astonishingly small. Programmers now are not drastically worse than programmers back then, but a lot of software is much less efficient just because hardware is so good it doesn't matter.
Though in the case of software bloat - it isn't actually a problem in many cases. It often makes more economic sense to churn out less efficient software so you can sell more quickly and generate more revenue, rather than to spend lots of time optimizing every small piece of it. No one cares if an iPhone app takes up 5 MB instead of 3MB.
The only people I know that regularly complain about software bloat are programmers! (And gamers, in particular PC gamers, tho they're much much more tech savvy than most other people.)
I think there's two aspects to this - one is that things are good enough that there's less pressure to improve; but the other is that things are good enough that a random change is likely to result in a bigger drop for someone, given that they're starting at a high point.
> the post office still needs to deliver the same amount of mail
The post office *hasn't* needed to deliver the same amount of mail, though - historically, the number was always rising as the population grew, more recently it's plummeted thanks to email and the widespread adoption of the internet in general.
Also, the post office was always this weird branch of semi-privatized government that combined the worst aspects of privatization (required to remain revenue-neutral, no tax dollars for funding) and government (having to answer to the whims of Congress), so again, not really the best example of why the government needs to consume more GDP.
This seems like it's at least in part a problem of how our institutions have scaled. We just have a lot more people than we used to, but at the same time, our institutions haven't scaled up to meet the challenges of that increased population. We have processes and procedures that make greatly amplify the voice and power of small groups of people, and those have not scaled up as well.
The NRA has a budget of $412 million and 5.5 million member, which sounds like a lot, but really doesn't amount to much when compared to the majority (66% in one poll, 75% in another) of Americans who favor gun control. If we take the lower number, 66%, that's around 240 million people. Yet somehow the NRA, with just $412M and 5.5M people, is able to hugely influence the country's gun laws.
But this isn't just a left/right thing. We could find many other examples of small groups of people exercising extremely high political leverage. Polls in the Bay Area show a clear majority favor building more housing, yet the NIMBYs seem to be winning.
Of course, the very forces that have led to this situation make it hard to fix. Any attempt to reduce the power that minority groups exercise is an existential threat to those minority groups. And of course, there is a very legitimate concern that a system which _doesn't_ have these sorts of safeguards _will_ disregard the well-being of minority groups.
Sorry, I don't have any good solutions.
Rather than removing veto points, since it's hard to know what is a safe trade-off, how about structuring them (or more of them) so they can be used at a finite rate? E.g. each caucus in Congress gets a fixed number of filibusters per term. Some veto points would be difficult to do this with -- e.g. judicial review of laws -- but where implemented it would force prioritization of vetos without eliminating them.
That sounds like quadratic voting.
If there's a limit to how many times you can say "no", but not a limit to how many times I can ask, then I just need to keep asking until you run out. Then you can't REALLY veto anything, you can merely waste everyone's time.
I think this is already a problem in some areas; e.g. if the public mobilizes to protest some unpopular law and successfully gets it stopped, the minority that wanted the law can just try again later, and stirring the public to opposition becomes harder each time as the public becomes tired of hearing about this issue.
Just brainstorming here (not claiming this is a good solution, or even *a* solution at all - it just came to mind), what might it be like if the limit counted for both things - each time you filibuster, you lose a slot you could use to propose a bill.
There's a much simpler explanation for the rise of vetocracy, especially for local issues: the relevant people already have what they need, so they see no need to build more. That's the reason for the fall of supersonic aircraft -- it's not worth annoying millions of people with a sonic boom every time a businessman wants to save one hour going from NY to LA.
Decades ago when waves of middle-class families moved to the suburbs, huge highway networks were built so they could commute. So logically, there is no energy now to build good public transport for commutes; the people who would use it already have cars. But that doesn't mean that we've forgotten how to build things! When the MacArthur Maze collapsed in 2007, making lots of Bay Area commutes impossible, it was fixed under budget and in record time. The reason California can't build high speed rail but can repair the MacArthur Maze is that important people would have been fired if the Maze wasn't repaired quickly, while nobody is going to be fired if high speed rail takes another 50 years, because nobody is organizing their life around needing high speed rail.
The same dynamic explains most of the other examples. For instance, the state of public schools in large cities. There isn't going to be pressure at the top to fix them, because everybody in the upper-middle class there already has their kids in private school. That's why many private schools in the US are open now, while most public schools are closed. The same dynamic goes on with police versus private security in gated communities, the post office versus UPS, and public defenders versus lawyers. Once an alternative forms, and those that can afford it move over, the public option just decays away. Unfortunately, I've never heard of an example of this process reversing itself.
This is very insightful, and can be used to make the social democratic case for universal (vs. means-tested) social insurance / benefits and for fully public services (vs. public options in private markets): everyone benefits, and everyone is in the same boat, so there's an incentive to make keep things high-quality. This ensures that the programs survive politically (because of the universalism) and that less well-off people get good stuff (because public services don't become marginalized.)
I mean, I could also see that ending up with the public service sucking anyway, for all the reasons such things often do, but also now there's no escape for anyone and none of the benefits of allowing the competition (e.g., no one attempting any paradigm-shifting alternatives which might eventually become universal and universally better, since large, critical, and universal government services are much less able to take a long shot than "just some guy").
Yeah, that's a sensible concern. Though my anecdotal impression is that in practice, countries that have universal benefits and robust public services (Western Europe, Singapore, Japan) tend to have higher quality programs than those that don't. So at least there's a chance of making it work.
For me, it's much harder to imagine the opposite scenario: a society with public and private options where the public option doesn't become ghettoized, for the reasons knzhou pointed out.
Also, I think it's useful to distinguish between social insurance / benefits and public services here. Social insurance is making sure that everyone is insulated from risk - cutting checks to the disabled, elderly, unemployed, etc. Not sure how much paradigm-shifting innovation is really possible there. Just make it as frictionless and efficient as possible. Ditto with social benefits, which is just cutting checks for certain kinds of people you want to support - parents, low wage earners, low-income folks, etc.
Public services is where your point about fundamental innovation sticks better. For instance, maybe driverless cars will make bus service irrelevant, and governments should just give lower-income people money so they can afford the ride? Or maybe you don't need to install audible signals for blind folks at traffic lights if you can give them a portable device that does better job?
Competition doesn't get you paradigm shifting innovation. Slack along with *any* incentive for improving is what creates innovation. Financial gain is only one incentive among many possible motivations a person can have for wanting to innovate, and it is useless if an environment is so competitive that no one has sufficient slack to innovate.
Rich people have been comfortable forever, why should this be more of a problem now?
My impression is that middle-class people moved to the suburbs partly *because* it became possibly to build suburbs. Right now lots of middle class (and upper class!) people want to move to big cities like Brooklyn and SF, and we still aren't building things for them. So I don't think there's some principle that infrastructure that middle class people need will get built.
It's true that this isn't a one-size-fits-all explanation for everything. But I think the idea of common interests between the rich and the poor does explain a bunch of past successes.
Think about the glamour as new forms of mass transportation were unveiled: trains, steamboats, cars, subways, and planes. These were celebrated because they were, at the time of their construction, the fastest way for _anyone_, rich or poor, to travel the relevant route. This isn't true for adding a bit more bus service along a route where the buses are slower than cars, or a high speed rail route that's slower than air.
We were happy to implement extremely invasive and expensive regulations in the Clean Air Act, because everybody had to breathe the same air. There's no energy for doing the same for food additives amid the obesity crisis, because the upper 20% can just shop at Whole Foods.
I think it’s an under-appreciated point that upper and middle class people want to move to Brooklyn and live in a brownstone on a tree-lined street, or SF and live in a “painted lady” Victorian. The number of well-heeled people who would choose a 600-unit high rise, even one with granite countertops, over a house in the suburbs is considerably smaller.
So why have streetcar suburbs been outlawed by the zoning codes almost nationwide? Since that is where upper and middle class people want to live?
At least with the private sector, an alternative to regulation would be liability through lawsuits: make people pay if, and only if, they cause actual harm. You could have punitive multipliers for those who fail to follow best practices in safety standards and some protection for those who actually do.
Seems that regulation is lot like enforcing pre-crime in Minority Report. If punitive measures were only focused on actual harm, not potential harm, then people could take calculated risks and much more would get done.
The issue is that "best practices" that the courts are notionally enforcing aren't something that was carved in stone by the finger of God and carried down from Mount Sinai.
For example, Ford made exactly the calculation you're talking about with the infamous Pinto, where they balanced the costs of a recall with the expected value of a life from previous lawsuits, and said that it wasn't worth fixing. When the courts heard that they made this calculation, they cranked the "damages" dial until this calculation no longer penciled out. If Ford were to make the same calculation with the new costs of a life, the court system would crank that dial again. The costs of liability are not an exogenous variable, they're capturing an implicit value judgement.
In some ways, this kind of "regulation by jury" is *more* opaque, because your lawyers can't tell you what the regulations *are*, they have to tell you what they *might be* after a jury hears about it.
It's precisely that uncertainty that makes it so big business has a strong incentive to follow best practices. Ford gets hosed in court, so GM and Chrysler make sure not to take the same risks. The main difference is that small businesses have have the option of going a high risk route. It's like the small time entrepreneur who forgoes fire insurance for a year to get through startup costs - he might be ruined, but he at least has the chance to compete, when he would otherwise be excluded from the market.
I should also add that having a fixed penalty, whether for smoking in a hotel room or picking your kid up late from daycare, makes it transactional - that is now the cost of doing this action, rather than having any other discouraging effect.
Lawsuits, unlike criminal trials, require the parties to pay for their own lawyers. To the extent that various legal rights are protected through legal liability, people with enough money to hire lawyers somewhat consistently have those rights while poorer people can't consistently punish the infringement of those rights and so have them infringed on more often. If regulation were replaced with legal liability, this infringement of the rights of the less wealthy would probably get worse (short of some sort of extension of the 6th Amendment to civil trials, and even that would likely suffer some of the same problems as current public defenders.
Class action lawsuits solve some of that problem and switching over to a loser pays attorney fees system would help as well. For the small stuff, expanding small claims courts could also help.
Well, there is a third possibility here -- government regulation, but enforced by spot checks rather than requiring passing tests in advance. (E.g., how restaurant inspections work; I gather a lot of things work this way in Europe as well?) This may be able to get a lot of the benefit of the liability route without the drawback that is the cost of litigation? Of course ideally we'd have a simpler/cheaper legal system and be able to just go the liability route without there being any such drawback, but as things are...
On a slightly tangential note, the late Roman Republic was absolutely a vetocracy. Reading about it, I was blown away by just how many officials had veto power. Imagine if the US Senate tried to pass a law and the Mayor of DC vetoed it. That's approximately what the Roman Republic was like. Part of what made Caesar so popular is that there was a huge backlog of popular policy changes that virtually everyone knew were necessary but couldn't get past someone's veto.
The Roman Republic was in some respects even worse in limiting magistrates' ability to get anything done because those magistrates often had direct control over parts of the military rather than having their rulings enforced indirectly, and it was feared that if they got too much power they would use that military force to overthrow the Republic. The limitation of the powers of (e.g.) Caesar and Pompey came from the fear that they would use stronger powers to make themselves dictator, as Sulla had done and Caesar would eventually do.
Yes. This is exactly why the Roman Republic turned into the Empire. We really are following the same path. We have to get rid of the malapportioned Senate, *in particular*, to avoid the same demand for the removal of the system in favor of something which can *get popular policy changes done*.
The UK threaded this needle with the Reform Acts and the Parliament Act.
One reason we "can't build stuff" (or, perhaps, just another way to say the same thing) is that "building stuff" is too expensive. It's not a secret at this point that construction costs are much, much higher in the US than elsewhere in the First World. It shouldn't be a secret, either, that construction costs were much cheaper here in the relatively recent past.
Consider an example from DC. The NoMa Metro station was completed in 2004 at a final construction cost of $104 million, or $137 million in 2018 dollars. By comparison, the Potomac Yards station budget was revised upward in April 2018 from $268 million to $320 million. I am unfamiliar with the details of either project (and I suspect that construction in Virginia away from an already-finished neighborhood would be easier), but it is inconceivable to me that in just 14 years, the cost of a comparable project can more than double in inflation-adjusted terms.
At my own employer, a large urban water utility, the cost of replacing water pipes has become so prohibitive (and there are so many other construction cost pressures) that we barely do it despite explicitly promising the public that we will. On a per-mile basis, costs have jumped from the $10 million-or-so range to upwards of $50 million or even more.
The vetocracy is one potential cause, and an important one. One project I am familiar with (urgently demanded by the public it would serve, and where the need was widely-recognized!) took 10 years to go from design to construction as various permits were applied for and reviews were conducted. But I think it's only one item on a long list of candidates. The NYT pointed their finger (in late 2017 or 18) in an article about the 2nd Ave Subway at a negative-feedback loop between politicians who like more jobs and don't care about efficiency and unions who like having more members and don't care about efficiency. I've seen explanations that include things like US safety regulations (way more rulebound and stupid than Europe's), the Americans with Disabilities Act (check out South American transit infrastructure for wheelchair accessibility), more middlemen and markups, environmental rules, allocation of financial risk, free public health insurance elsewhere, actual corruption, hidden inflation due to monetary policy, fewer illegal immigrants making labor more expensive, and others.
My own suspicion is that a CYA mindset and lack of competence has ruined the engineering profession in this country. Spec documents are enormous, byzantine, and require a huge amount of effort and expense to even write bids for. Why? Because someone got screwed by some shady contractor at some point in the past. The response wasn't to find better contractors that can be trusted, it was to add cruft to the system. Ultimately, only enormous firms that can afford the initial outlay can bid, and they make it all back in the cost of construction (since all bidders include that cost in their bids, even a fair, corruption-free competition doesn't help). Plus, our engineers tend to suck, lacking experience at actually building things and lacking the ability to detect bullshit from bidders, designers, construction managers, etc.
Even those who decry how much gets paid for this stuff don't seem to be able to fix the system and clean house.
I know that from the federal government side, we can't just "find better contractors that can be trusted" because *we're* not trusted to make those judgements. It's more-or-less a "right" to bid on a contract, and that right can't be taken away without a very high burden of proof.
This lack of trust happened, of course, because of previous Government employees who _couldn't_ be trusted, and were steering work to people giving them kickbacks. It may have ended up that passing rules to try to avoid the kickbacks may have cost more than the corruption, but in fairness to the original reformers, that this would become the case may not have been apparent to them at the time.
This is very probably part of it as well.
I vaguely remember a Megan McCardle post/article explicitly about how 'corruption' was simply one of the costs we paid to get things done and that it wasn't obviously, on net, a bad tradeoff.
> Consider an example from DC. The NoMa Metro station was completed in 2004 at a final construction cost of $104 million, or $137 million in 2018 dollars. By comparison, the Potomac Yards station budget was revised upward in April 2018 from $268 million to $320 million. I am unfamiliar with the details of either project (and I suspect that construction in Virginia away from an already-finished neighborhood would be easier), but it is inconceivable to me that in just 14 years, the cost of a comparable project can more than double in inflation-adjusted terms.
The projects are similar, but not quite apples to apples - I think a pretty critical detail is that the NoMa station was in a bit of a shitty urban area with not much going on pre-Metro station, whereas Potomac Yards is prime waterfront property located tantalizingly close to Amazon HQ2, with the station planned as a centerpiece for a new community, with elevated pedestrian paths and all sorts of frills.
These are both infill stations, so "already-finished neighborhood" is a bit of a misnomer - all that was fundamentally required at NoMa was slapping a station around already-cleared right-of-way along an elevated track.
I'm fairly confident the cost difference isn't due to property acquisition - is that not right? Potomac Yards was planned before Amazon decided to come to DC; the area is hot in part because of the success of other infill Metro stations. The fact that they're both infill stations should make them more comparable, not less - the track and ROW were already there in both cases.
> I'm fairly confident the cost difference isn't due to property acquisition - is that not right?
Ritzier property means higher taxes and that has nebulous offshoots with liability insurance and all sorts of other stuff.
> Potomac Yards was planned before Amazon decided to come to DC
But plans for it were expanded after Amazon announced HQ2. And, critically, Potomac Yard is not in DC. It's in Alexandria, which stopped being a part of DC back in 1846.
> the area is hot in part because of the success of other infill Metro stations.
NoMa (original name: New York Avenue) is literally the only infill Metro station.
> The fact that they're both infill stations should make them more comparable, not less - the track and ROW were already there in both cases.
The fact that they're both infill stations is why I said "not quite apples to apples" and not "apples vs oranges". But they're being designed under completely different circumstances, in completely different areas. You can build identical McMansions in St. Louis and San Francisco, but expecting them to have similar costs (even after factoring for land acquisition) is not the way it's done - and NoMa and Potomac Yard aren't identical McMansions, either.
> Isn't WMATA property tax-exempt? Insurance, perhaps.
> I don't know the specifics of the two jurisdictions, but by reputation, anyone who says it's easier to build in DC than VA would be laughed out of the room. Perhaps those reputations are undeserved.
> Fair. Other infill development/redevelopment would have been more accurate. Examples include Columbia Heights, DC's Wharf, Navy Yard
> How are the circumstances different between the two stations? I don't accept that either the area or the circumstances are completely different: there's an excellent chance that the contractors who bid are all the same firms, even. Is fancier construction/more bells and whistles enough to explain a >2x difference? If so, why didn't they drop the frills when the project began to get so expensive? There's been an ongoing fight over just having a second entrance to the station, due to cost, but its removal will save something like $50 million.
"First, is vetocracy the same as polarization? ... I'm not sure how Klein thinks of this. " Klein has clarified the difference and the interaction in a number of interviews I've heard. The idea is basically what how you put it - "vote points + polarization = gridlock" - and the prime example is indeed the filibuster.
"And a lot NIMBYism is unrelated to the Democrat/Republican divide." It's true that people's diverse identities have been subsumed into their national political identities, which have in turn polarized. This has affected state politics as well. But local land use is the one area where this hasn't happened, because it's where people have actual skin in the game, and their self-interest overrides national narratives. Witness "pro-climate" New York liberals opposing grid-scale solar farms being built near their second homes in the Hudson Valley. Everybody's a libertarian until the neighbor wants to build something you don't like.
"Second, why is this happening?" Tyler Cowen's book the Complacent Class gives a cultural argument for this: people across the political spectrum have become more averse to change, so we get stagnation because that's what people want.
To me, cases like California and NYC give the lie to the "polarization enables vetocracy" view. Relative to US polarization they're effectively political monocultures, yet they're notorious for being terrible at building things at the state / local level.
I think the existence of veto points precede national polarization. But if you mean "polarization worsens vetocracy," that doesn't mean other forces don't as well.
The more general idea here may be "political dynamics with lots of competing interests and low emphasis on cooperation worsen vetocracy." At the national level, the polarized political parties use vote points to paralyze government. At the California and NYS levels, it's different actors: old people who don't want their taxes raised, local community boards that oppose development, etc.
Whoever else we blame for "vetocracy", I doubt it can be Robert Moses or his opponents-- at least not directly. The backlash against Moses was mostly in the 60's AFAICT, and this data suggests subway costs at least (one commonly cited kind of infrastructure that's gotten harder to build) had their biggest increases pre-1940 and post-1988.
https://external-preview.redd.it/1yERPkTHUD9LsS-ejEBnfcuTC3kvZUyjU-Ta0Q6eZAI.png?auto=webp&s=8a9c100f87797e56052db8b9f9a93fd67a72e812
I agree the Moses backlash is not the main thing driving up subway costs. However, there is a direct line from Moses to vetocracy, at least in NY. For example, Amazon's HQ2 development was vetoed by the PACB. The PACB was created as part of the Moses backlash. More here: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/02/15/amazon-new-york-225077/
Fundamentally there really isn’t a mechanism to decrease the size of civic bureaucracy. As an example, unincorporated communities within a county can become a city but I’ve never heard of cities merging or self abolishing. The same goes for government agencies who are structurally incentivized to grow their rice bowl (budget). Perhaps institutions need term limits or expiration dates.
As an aside, I don’t agree with the idea that corporate governance suffers from too much oversight. Corporate Governance trends generally follow the business cycle with frothy times leading to dual class shares and other insanely favorable mechanisms for management.
There are some cities (small ones) that unincorporate. They're often accused of nefarious motives in attempting to avoid some of the obligations they'd have if they were a city.
What possible reason would anyone have for ceasing to be a city if NOT "avoiding the obligations of being a city"? Why would that be an objectionable reason?
Would we complain if someone retired from politics to avoid the obligations of being a politician? If a soldier left the army so that they wouldn't need to fulfill the obligations of being a soldier?
If there are some obligations that we don't feel OK letting people dodge by not-being-a-city, then maybe those obligations ought to be tied to something other than being-a-city?
Here are couple of articles on cities that took this step:
https://reason.com/2020/03/16/this-ohio-town-dissolved-itself-over-a-1-percent-tax-increase/
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/23/516859345/the-small-n-c-town-that-wants-to-dissolve-itself
FWIW, I _love_ the idea of institutions having term limits, and am starting to have a crush on a similar idea for corporations.
“Third, if the government can't do anything, why aren't we a libertarian paradise?”
One of the things Reason likes to harp on is that an increasing piece of the budget is non-discretionary and spent automatically, i.e. the vetocracy prevents us from spending less
Perhaps, people are increasingly disconnected from how anything actually gets done, or made, or built. Many of my former classmates hold jobs where they don't come into contact with anyone who directly does anything. I have one where I do, but I specifically sought it out. Water utilities, power utilities, etc often have to do public education campaigns just to remind people that they exist, show them how they work, and inform them that those resources don't appear by magic.
Perhaps we take for granted that material goods will be plentiful and cheap, and that any one barrier placed in one person's or company's way will be overcome - and when those goods do become unavailable, the blame is put on vast impersonal forces ("systemic racism causes food deserts"; "housing is a human right") when simple economics (as warped by government interventions or otherwise) are more likely the cause.
I don’t really see why you struggle to square a big, sclerotic government with a lack of proactive policymaking / ‘building’. Historically, that’s a common combination. By the 80s, the Soviet State was simultaneously big and useless. Given we have plenty of other real-life examples, we shouldnt really focus on how it works abstractly, although, just for the record, the abstract answer is just as easy: making and enforcing rules is a lot easier than creating what the rules regulate. The rest is just a mixture of rent seeking and status quo bias.
This doesn't answer the "why now?" question, but an intermediate answer as to "why the veto points" is that we're simply a lot less callous* than people were up through about the early '70s. They wanted to build this stuff more than we do.
I'm going to confine my comments to infrastructure, because I am most familiar with it. But what you see is that we want other stuff more than we want to build infrastructure. In earlier generations, they wanted the infrastructure.
Any time you put a conditional on a project, you are implicitly saying you want that condition more than you want the project. The simplest one everybody is familiar with is cost: you generally have a maximum amount you're willing to spend, and if the project costs over that, well, you don't build. But this applies to other things.
If you say, "We want high-speed rail, but we don't want to displace people to do it" you're saying "We want to avoid displacing people more than we want high-speed rail." The previous generation that built stuff may have had a vague wish to not displace people, but when push came to shove and it turns out that efficient highway routing meant somebody was going to get displaced, well, pick the cheapest land (i.e., poor neighborhood) and push it flat. But if you can't satisfy the conditional statement, ehhh, if you're smart you say "we can't do this because the problem is overconstrained" but since admitting we can't build high-speed rail under these conditions is politically unacceptable, we flail around for decades trying to find an answer.
Not only do we not want to displace people (rich people because we have to buy the land at fair-market value which blows up the costs of the project and poor people because that has racial implications), but we've got a laundry list of other things as well. The combination of these mean that there is no solution that can provide the infrastructure and satisfy these demands. I cannot emphasize how much easier it was for previous engineers, who cut this Gordian Knot by simply not worrying about it.
As a less theoretical example, I'll talk about something from my job. Because I don't want to get fired, I'm going to mix things up to avoid identifying specifics, but I'll ask you to believe that what I'm saying is at least "truthy" if not the exact sequence of events.
I have a project where we've been tasked to pass juvenile fish around a dam so they can go to the ocean to spawn. However, this dam actually *had* a system, that was built into the dam when it was constructed, which was early 50's to mid-60s. However (×2), the system...didn't work. Fish mortality was very high, and other issues meant that even what few adults made it weren't returning. The answer at the time was to abandon the system in place.
Now, looking over documents and the original design, I believe that this system was a relatively good-faith effort to provide this passage. When I first saw it (with little experience in fish passage systems) I had to have somebody explain to me *why* it didn't work, because it seemed like it should to my little structural engineer brain. But, and this is the point of my rambling post, when it *didn't* work, they didn't desperately try to figure out how to make it work, or start on a new system that might have worked, they said, "Well, I guess we tried," threw in the bulkheads, turned around, walked away, and agreed to never speak of this again. Then three generations later a court told the Executive Branch that we needed to figure out how to make it work, and we've not come up with an answer that won't cost in the low 9 figures, because it turns out it's *really hard*.
So that was their decision matrix: Try to pass fish, and if it doesn't work, fuck it. I want to emphasize that this is a fundamental value difference! If you had told them that they shouldn't build the dam because it will cause a dramatic reduction in fish populations, they would have looked at you like you had a dick growing out of your forehead. That just...wouldn't have mattered to them. They weren't going around hating the fish, they just didn't think there was a value there that justified the loss of flood control that halting the project would have represented. They wouldn't have minded if their system *did* work, and would have been proud if it did, but it's proper functioning wasn't a *requirement*, either.
* "Callousness" may not be exactly the right word, but my vocabulary is failing me ATM.
This resonates so, so much. Failure became an option, and cost became no object.
Well, it's not *exactly* that cost became no object. Cost really wasn't an object in some of these "failure is not an option" projects before. They often wasted *PHENOMENAL* amounts of money.
For example, the Manhattan Project wasted huge amounts of money because they weren't sure what would work. The history of that project is littered with false starts, because if something *might* work, they tried it. Many of these things didn't work, but they basically just didn't worry about that. They were just very, very lucky that General Groves was honest. It turns out that to purchase uranium ore, the Government ended up providing him a slush fund banking account *in his own name* to purchase ores that may have become available. He just didn't use this power to line his own pockets. Plus you realize that both Oak Ridge and Hanford were condemned on basically his judgement alone. The GOVERNORS of the states of Tennessee and Washington had no veto over his decisions--they were just informed that the land for these facilities was being seized for war-related purposes, and they weren't either told the purpose or given an opportunity to protest. Imagine being the homeowner who came home from your farm field to find a notice stapled to your door that you had 30 days to leave your house, or you'd be frog-marched out by Military Police!
Or the Apollo Project. They weren't *quite* as wasteful as the Manhattan Project, but they still wasted a lot of money. NASA's official history is here: https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4204/contents.html
Reading it, they discuss that the way Launch Complex 39 works (they erect the rocket in the Vertical Assembly Building, carry it to the pad with the crawler-transporter, then launch it) is only cost-efficient if they make 15 launches per year. But they only made 15 launches *total*. They knew that building it would be a waste of money by about 1964 or '65, but since redesigning everything to be more cost efficient would have meant missing the end-of-decade goal, they just wasted the money.
Nowadays, we worry about wasting the money, and not making the deadline. Which often ends up costing more than just wasting the money.
To clarify: the link is for the official history of just the Launch Complex, not the entire Apollo Program.
Thanks, this was a really good and well informed post. I have the impression that in the 1950's and 1960's dams were going from 'yes, save us from mass destruction from floods' to 'why a dam again?' from my grandmother who moved in afterwards talking about the dam at Branson Mo.
You must be talking about Table Rock Dam. I was stationed at Fort Leonard Wood for about 5 years, so I'm a bit familiar with the area, though I only went to Branson once in that time.
I do think this is something worth noting. I've talked with coworkers before about how we need to be better about PR for our dams and that we should put a video on YouTube every year showing what flooding would have looked like for that water year without flood control projects. The example I use is how anti-vaxxers seem a lot more credible these days than they did back when vaccines were invented.
Nowadays, everybody has sort of forgotten about how the river would eat you on a fairly frequent basis. Once dams were in place to cut down on the frequency of flooding, just like vaccines cut way back on the number of kids who were turned into shamboling zombies who spent their lives in an iron lung, people kinda forgot about how amazing it was to go from floods occurring every 5 to 10 years to being a once in a lifetime event.
Of course, you need to correct this viewpoint, because it's from a guy whose dick gets hard when looking at dams. For me, standing in an unwatered navigation lock looks like something out of the Lord of the Rings, so you can't really take my word for it. Maybe it really isn't worthwhile to make the environmental tradeoffs, but that's something that should be decided with rational discussion, rather than wibbling about how the loss of snail darter habitats makes you feel.
Not sure those are great examples. Both are unique circumstances with specific, national security motivations; cost was explicitly no object. Was there similar waste in building I-70, or the Chrysler Building, or Hyperion sewage treatment plant?
Hmmm, I was more trying to approach this from a perspective of, "They were focused on way different stuff" and trying to illustrate that. They weren't going to start doing the squirrel-hand-washing thing and fretting about something so simple as wasting money, but your reading is a fair interpretation of my remarks. I apologize, but ask you to consider that I was about two glasses of wine deep when I made the comment, and I'm about three glasses now.
You work in the construction industry, so this example might have more resonance to you than some rando off the street: people killed while building Hoover Dam. When I went there as a kid to do a tour with my parents, they did mention that 112 people died while building the dam. At the time, I just kinda treated it as a fact of life. "Huh. A bunch of people died while building this huge thing." Another note is that the bid came in within about $40,000 of the estimate, so there was no cost overrun worth discussing.
As an adult who spent nearly a decade in the Army and then moved over to the construction industry as a civilian engineering employee, I think you might have the same response I do: "*HOLY. JESUS. FLYING. FUCK. THEY. KILLED. ONE-HUNDRED AND TWELVE. PEOPLE. ON. THIS. CONSTRUCTION. PROJECT*."
One of my favorite? sites on the Internet that I use to illustrate "The past is a different country" is the Bureau of Reclamation's website about the fatalities building Hoover Dam.
https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/history/essays/fatal.html
That page has individual pages for each year of construction, which are then broken down by cause, and by date within each cause. This makes it a bit difficult to really see what I'm talking about. So to focus on what I mean, let's talk the fatalities for the year 1933, which was the first big year for construction (the previous years being dominated by analysis by the engineers and mobilization by the Contractor):
https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/history/essays/fat1933.html
Because it's broken up by cause, the dates don't jump out at you at first. But look at them. Somebody died on the first of the year due to a fall, a couple people killed by explosions on Jan 10th & 11th, another fall on Feb 1, another guy hit by falling material on Feb 7th.
And it just goes *ON AND ON. THEY HAD A FATAL ACCIDENT EVERY TWO WEEKS ON AVERAGE FOR THE BEGINNING OF THAT YEAR.*
Can you imagine even the most callous jobsite superintendant you've had finding this *remotely* acceptable these days? Or even your own office as an Owner (which I think you're approaching this from)? Just let that page wash over you for a few seconds, and IMAGINE what your life would be like if you had that many people killed on a jobsite. I know that even in the US Government, we'd straight-up fire a contractor for something even a tenth that bad. For Scott, if you do end up reading this, imagine that you have two or three people drop dead in your Practice's office after you prescribed them drugs to imagine how gut-wrenchingly horrific you'd find this by modern standards. That's what it was like to build infrastructure before about 1950.
That's how much they wanted to build infrastructure. Compare that to how much we *don't* today, when we would not find this acceptable.
Another less extreme example is the empire state building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_State_Building#Construction. 5 people died and they just dumped all of the debris in the Atlantic ocean.
While I don't want to go back to the standards of the early 20th century, I think that safety functions as a one way ratchet due to fear of being blamed for rolling back a safety measure, in particular we are not judged for deaths caused through delay or inaction as long as its part of the status quo.
Similar examples are Lunch Atop a Skyscraper, and a photograph of a bunch of guys on a turbine runner at Bonneville Dam:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunch_atop_a_Skyscraper
https://www.opb.org/artsandlife/series/historical-photo/oregon-historical-photo-bonneville-dam-columbia-river/
For that last one, people might not be as familiar with the site, so let me lay it out for you. The guys standing on the floor on the left are on the turbine hall deck at +55.0 feet above seal level (ASL). The draft tube, which is the bottom of the shaft they are all standing over for this photo is something like -35.0 feet (again, drunk right now). That's right, 35 feet *below* sea level, or a nine-story drop from where all these guys are standing.
What's common between both of these photos? Not a single fall-protection harness on anybody. If anybody slipped in either photo, they'd fall to their doom. And these are mere photo opportunities! They were done solely to have a cool picture! Today, these would be "Exhibit 1" in the lawsuit about how utterly uncaring these contractors were. But they were something that the contractor (and in the latter photo, the Government) wouldn't care a whit about having in the public eye in the mid- to late-30's.
When I worked grain bin construction, my boss told us about a previous big job he worked on where someone got his and said yes, guys get killed in any big construction job, well okay. His brother smushed his thumb in a low gear motor, I cut my back crawling through a hole under a pressed aluminum ladder, foreman fell off the roof and broke his ankle, within a couple days one hot August fifteen years ago. Well okay. Maybe they say they don't 'find this acceptable' nowadays but I'd say they just bury it or use it for shakedowns.
Could this have something to do with prices of medical expenses these days?
I know someone who suffered a workplace accident and is not able to get adequate treatment. He is out of work because the injury left him with debilitating headaches (so he has no employer insurance), and worker comp won't even pay for him to see a doctor, except once in a few months (and sometimes it has to be their doctor); they also keep refusing to cover prescribed medications. At one point, the doctor they sent him to said "I want you to know that I have nothing against you, but I am working for your insurance."
I am guessing worker comp did not have to spend so much money on workplace injuries due to medical help being cheaper (and maybe easier to get?) before. Maybe that could be one of the factors?
This really makes me think of the Pareto principle, also known as 80/20, where 80% of the problems are caused by only 20% of the causes.
It's also well-known in programming: 20% of the features are 80% of the costs. So if you are willing to give up on (part of) those 20%, you can really cut costs.
It's ultimately also a question of flexibility. Perhaps we've democratized and bureaucratized so much, that our demands of the people who build or otherwise create things have become set in stone. We are no longer able to take a step back and say: "It costs THAT MUCH? Fuck it."
This x1000. I had the opportunity to visit a Chinese mega-project (pretty late in construction, when they were just putting the finishing touches on it). There were workers on the bamboo frames of scaffolding (there were no actual floor boards) installing lighting 30 feet up with no fall protection. The workers' living quarters were...not up to western standards. It would never fly in the US.
The solution is to create competition and allow institutions to fail. USG can create competing regulatory agencies that operate in different locations. (like state competition but more intense). This even solves the career suicide problem, since only that agency will fail and not others. (FDA2 vs FDA1 etc). Tax dollars only go to institutions that a person chooses which can be a mechanism for failure or something like that. A vibrant China could also kick start the USG back into power
I'm surprised that neither Ezra Klein nor Scott have mentioned that perhaps the U.S. is just too big and diverse to have any sort of effective centralized plans that appeal to a large enough slice of the population. We trumpet our national space programs and considering the tiny budget of NASA as a % of the federal budget it is indeed pretty good and while there's no doubt that it does favor a few congressional districts it is also focused on something outside the US - namely, well, space. Any big project that seems to favor one state, city or district is immediately thought of as "pork" before any objective evaluation is made and perhaps in a country as big and diverse as this, we can't hope to achieve the use of objective criteria to evaluate projects that would benefit the "nation." Yes, DoD R&D (which consumes more than 40% of all federal R&D spending according to the Congressional Research Service) might also fall in this Focused Outside the US category but my own experience in DoD R&D suggests it has succumbed to far too much congressional 'steering' and less basic science. Hard to see this country getting behind any big future projects without an immediate existential threat creating urgency. Private R&D seems to be 'steering' most investments now and, of course, only if there's money to be made within the near-term. For example, it's hard to envision any transportation system that isn't reliant on expanding paved surfaces and moving single persons around in several thousand pound boxes even when it makes little sense objectively; there's just too much money invested in roads and road-dependent suburbs and we are tied to too much sunk-cost fallacy thinking. The ever increasing cost of just maintaining what we have - whether it's roads, social security, or the size of the military will continue to suppress any ability to create new things. We've gotten too big, too old, and too focused on 'what's mine.'
Yes, breaking up the United States is the way to go! (This would be great for India, China, Congo, and Indonesia too.)
The vetocracy dynamic is at alive and well at the state and local level. It's not just about the size and diversity of the modern US. Besides, the US was geographically the same size and pretty close to equally diverse during the peak building phase.
I agree but on a smaller scale/on a local level the vetocracy becomes more discernible and can be debated in detail. I look around at my own small town and find numerous examples. Yes, it takes a lot of unpaid effort but the vetocracy can be overcome at the local level (arguable at the state level where influence is wielded by well-paid lobbyists). I stand by my thesis that federal efforts for any inwardly focused large-scale effort (equivalent to the interstate highway effort) will become more and more difficult. I think the outcome will be a looser confederation in the long-run where state-by-state and locality vs locality competition becomes the norm.
Maybe I'm misreading. Is it fair or a straw man to call this an appeal to (slightly more) unchecked majoritarianism? I feel like the Federalist Papers, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bryan Caplan have already staked pretty fertile ground here. Any proposal should at least mention why they were all wrong in passing.
I.e., would "fewer vetoes" really have been better under [politician you don't like]?
As anyone, I want the state to get more power to do things I like and less power to do the things I don't like. I like weird things though, so "more power in general" sounds orthogonal to that. Not opposed to my interests, per se, some good some bad. Just about perpendicular, plus or minus 10 degrees. So I'm honestly pretty ambivalent.
What if "more" or "less" power to do things just isn't the right dial to turn?
Like... If we're really worried about signal/noise ratio, say you have a staticky radio, maybe instead of debating which way to turn the volume... Why not turn the other dial?
How about...
Everything needs 70/100 votes, which is a nutty vetocracy. But wait! There are all these neat fun ways to earn extra credit.
- If you propose your policy run for 5 years as an RCT distributed across the various zip codes or whatever, and set metrics and targets, and if you meet those at the end of 5 years the policy expands, and if you miss the policy sunsets, then you get 10 free votes in favor.
- If your policy passes some conditional metric on prediction markets, you get 10 free votes in favor.
- If you like bipartisanship, then maybe if your policy gets at least 25 votes from at least two different parties, you get 10 free votes.
- If your legislation just names a post office or landmark or endorses a symbolic statement without actually changing anything, you get negative 10 votes.
- If some "group we like" endorses the legislation, it gets a few extra votes. Maybe this is a duly appointed panel of experts, or the CBO, or a group protecting the interests of some element of our society we like and support. To be honest, this one probably collapses under its potential for abuse. But it is something you could play with if you wanted to tilt things in favor of certain groups, much as the bicameral legislature currently does for states, or the Supreme Court does for, I don't know, elite lawyers obsessed with nuanced paradoxes in meta level rulemaking, or however you'd prefer to characterize them.)
Any technical solution like this requires that for it to be instituted there is political buy in. Which gets you back to the original problem
Possibly so.
I'm optimistic that meta-level fixes often sidestep political issues (or can be carried by one political party and not easily jettisoned later). Expanded CBO reviews were a technical, meta-level patch, and while originally pushed with partisan rhetoric, they were sticky across administrations because it's hard to oppose the basic premise that you should have (semi-)independent net cost reviews. I think anti-pork measures are an attempt at a technical patch (though I think that one may have had complex unintended side effects).
Certainly you're right though that there are some domains where the policy impacts are more obvious, so the meta-patch just becomes a proxy for whatever political fight. And the more dramatic the change (like the ones I originally proposed), the more it will prompt questions about who really benefits.
I'm still convinced technical, meta-level tweaking to improve the quality of output is the most fertile ground, and would outperform ideas about simply increasing or decreasing state power (either direction) in terms of political viability and consistent positive effects.
But the proof of the pudding and all that, hard to say. Not sure if there's a "good governance" think tank that only looks at meta-level questions of organizing government. There probably should be something like that (but I doubt it would get any support or have any influence!)
I can think of precisely no time in the history of the US when having the Senate was an improvement. If it had been abolished in 1789 before the Constitution was finished, as far as I can tell, literally everything would have gone better, under politicians I like, and under those I don't.
So: Abolish the Senate.
I feel like I see similar things in corporate structures. Fear from mistakes can hamstring you to the point of not taking on crazy projects that could have a really large upswing in payout. And it isn't like all fear is unwarranted. There are plenty of honestly bad ideas floated as projects all of the time. Thing is, some of them succeed for no real reason that was predictable ahead of time.
It is frustrating, as I want to tell folks to take those ridiculous ideas and run with them. But I also don't want to lie to anyone if their idea is likely going to fail. Nor do I want to let folks run down a road to failure if I don't know that they can recover from it.
To that end, is this something that grows into things? Another rehashing of startup versus establishment?
You're quite focused on the doing more/doing less trade-off. I would view this problem in terms of *what* the government is able to do. Regulations - often in the form of telling companies "you can't do that" - look to me like they can be standing in the way of getting stuff (excluding bossing people around) done. See, for example, regulations standing in the way of covid tests and protective equipment early in the pandemic. On housing, the government is great at saying you can't build any higher there, you need to make an underground parking garage, etc.
Bottom line, I don't think that you have to be all or nothing. Making cumbersome regulations is one thing the government is good at. Procuring things (face masks) for the armed forces is something the government is bad at. No contradiction!
The vetocracy does not just exist outside organizations. Organizations do a great job of killing projects internally long before they reach the public eye.
If your department becomes more efficient, you can look forward to a budget cut next year. If your department fails, you can blame circumstances outside your control (the economy, the weather, old infrastructure, whatever) and say that more money is needed to deal with those problems.
Time to hire replacement employees is measured in years. Someone's not doing a good job? The standard of comparison is: are they better than literally noone at all. And that's for management, where you have the option to fire someone! If they're union, there's no point in even considering it.
Promotions are extremely slow, because there is no growth. There's never a new division being created that you can promote the up-and-comer to go run. People are promoted when someone up the ladder retires. And at each rung, it's 3-5 candidates per, each time. Performance isn't irrelevant, but there's rarely enough to go around. Good people will stick around for ~5 years, realize they're going nowhere, and head to greener pastures.
Randomly, someone who sucks will impress an Important Leader. That person will then rocket up the org chart to some newly-created position with a newly-impressive salary. More than anything else, this kills the morale of the handful of actually effective employees being told to bide their time and pushes them out.
Management is always into the latest buzzwords and fads, but lacks the energy to truly embrace them and the force to implement them (nobody's going to get fired, and the long-timers know they're not getting promoted). As a result, management initiatives are frequent, but greeted with eyerolls and then ignored.
You can propose a good project with a strong ROI. Everybody will agree that it sounds like a great idea and would certainly help the organization reach its goals. It will then be met with the following objections: (1) we can't do it for legal reasons. (2) we don't have the money to build it now, even if it will pay off over time. (3) nobody here knows how to do it, and we aren't capable of hiring anyone. (4) if we did it, it would piss off someone important. (5) we can't do anything until we have considered every possible project and ranked them- if we did something other than the top priority first, that would be inefficient. (6) none of the people who we would hire to do this are women/minorities/veterans/whatever. (7) not all of the people who would benefit most from this are women/minorities/veterans/whatever. (8) if we built it, we couldn't operate it. (9) if we could operate it, we couldn't maintain it. (10) it's much too risky.
This used to be easy. Stage a Civil War, a World War, a Great Depression, or something of that nature once or twice a generation. Something severe enough that the usual veto points are simply tossed out of the window and progress gets made. (Too bad about those innocent Japanese-Americans.)
But the last one of those ended before I was born, and I'm old enough to have adult children. Apollo and Vietnam were carefully kept from growing quite that drastic. Then Vietnam and Watergate led to such mistrust of government that removing veto points became 3x harder.
No, I don't have research to back this up.
Mancur Olson did some research on that. He argued that the UK was the "sick man of Europe" while Germany was booming in the post-war era because Germany was starting over from scratch, while the UK had grown sclerotic with things like labor unions (much more divided into crafts than in Germanic countries where a single organization might cover a huge swathe of the population) preventing anything from getting done.
Yes but no. No: the UK built a massive welfare state in a few years after the War. People may argue about whether that was progress or regress, but it was done. Yes: in 1970s Germany, I once overheard someone say that the British had been the real losers, judging by long-term outcome. But: Olson knows much more than I do
The guys you overheard were from western Germany, right? The comparison to UK is unfair; UK was not a cold war front state with a comparable opposite right across the border and therefore supported from abroad. How great would Germany's 'Wirtschaftswunder' have been if the situation had been different?
They built on top of an existing system, they didn't scrap an old one and start basically from scratch.
Postwar UK economic problems where entirely the result of their poor economic decision making. Germany was not leveled to the ground, most of the german state and law survived the war, so there was no fresh ground. the difference is that they made better choices, germany left rationing several years before the UK did, and UK's commitment to full employment destroyed international competitiveness in areas they did have advantages, like aerospace. The germans also had to maintain a substantially larger army for most of the cold war and were growing from a poorer base, but were still richer than the UK by the 70s.
> Stage [ … ] [s]omething severe enough that the usual veto points are simply tossed out of the window and progress gets made.
The era of modern pandemics has already begun (not that this is comforting in any way).
Given the events of the past year, it's unclear to me that major shocks to the system will have the effect you want.
Though, we did get two things out of the pandemic. The first is mRNA vaccines. The second is telework. My workplace made excuses for years as to why workers couldn't use remote access to work from home. The system already existed - it's just that most people were not allowed to use it. We instantly won that battle when the pandemic started.
Re: “is vetocracy the same as polarization?”
The explanation I’ve heard from Klein on his podcast is that they reinforce each other. Vetocracy, where nothing is getting done, leaves politicians with less of substance to talk about, so that public discourse tends toward more and more symbolic— and polarizing—stuff. And the post already described the other direction, where polarization leads to the veto points being utilized more and more.
It's also much 'cheaper' to make extreme promises, when it's very unlikely that the bluff will be called.
In a way, it boils down to the technical definition of "veto" in the sense of *one* party being able to say no, instead of deciding by majority vote.
After WWII in Europe there was a strong need for unification, and while everyone agreed on principle, no state wanted to give up its veto power. The result were institutions like Council of Europe (don't confuse with European Council and Council of European Union - we are great at naming things here) which is like UN, but on European level, and very much like UN it can't do much, because of the veto.
The breakthrough came only with European Coal and Steel Community, where some of the member state sovereignty was deletegated to the organization and later on as voting with veto was being gradually replaced by deciding by qualified majority.
But, at the same time, there's still lot of power being exercised by member states (subsidiarity principle, council of ministers, veto is some areas) which prevents EU from becoming a superstate where a minority could be oppressed by the majority.
Another way to look at it is what Robinson & Acemoglu describe in their book "The Narrow Corridor". What they say is that we get "liberty" only if the power of state is in balance with the pover of society. (By society they mean all the sub-state interest groups such as NGOs, regions, trade unions, religious confessions, organized crime, you name it.)
If state is stronger that society what you get is China. Society can't do anything and CPC bulldozes it over whenever it wants. If society is stronger than state what you get is Democratic Republic of Congo. The state doesn't even control parts of its territory, much less the more subtle issues like taxation or public services. (Picture: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJS1iUWWkAA-pQX.jpg)
Maybe it's stating the obvious, but in R&A view, the US is erring in the latter, not the former way.
In technical sense, I think, there are two mechanisms needed to keep the balance.
First, a mechanism to choose the solution in presence of disagreement. This could be majority voting in parliament, national referendums, as in Switzerland, or similar.
However, this should be only an incentive to engage in negotiaton and not to drag it on forever. Basically, a threat: If you can't negotiate a nice positive-sum solution, the matter will be decided by formal procedure and likely leave the both parties worse off.
Therefore, the second mechanism is needed: A dispute resolution procedure. A way to get the relevant interest groups to the negotiating table and a procedure to favorize those willing to agree on a compromise over those at the extremes. (An example of such depolarizing measure is collegiality principle: The deciding group is made of representatives of all parties, yet the group speaks with one voice. Once the decision is made, everybody must back it.)
Pseudoerasmus discusses "The Narrow Corridor" here:
https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus/status/1179746491247874049
I wish he'd made it into an actual blog post rather than a tweet thread.
There's been general acceptance within society that referendum is the defining, final procedure. The losing groups -- generally Republicans -- have done their best to fight that, though, and remain in power despite losing the popular vote.
The traditional model for getting around this is rights, especially ones that smell like property rights.
Actual private property is the simple case. In libertopia Dr. Nozick has an unvetoable right to build a rollercoaster in his back yard. The blast radius is limited by the size of his yard (and more realistically, can common law ideas like nuisance).
Governments too had domains where they held rights. These domains did overlap a bit to give us checks and balances but the US Constitution lays out a fairly limited and legible amount of this.
The modern administrative state intrudes into private rights in detail. Government power also has been pushed down to a plethora of agencies each with the power to veto each other and the public.
More authoritarian countries have produced a relatively veti-proof administrative state.
>"Well, you could decrease the number of veto points. But anyone who tried that would encounter two problems. First, it would be career suicide - when something bad inevitably happened, they would be on the hook for failing to prevent it - and no credit they got for all the cool things they were able to build would be able to save them."
You're being far too pessimistic here. There have been many modern examples of "veto" power being reduced or removed. The result, mainly, is that the general public is unaware of these arcane procedural details, and it bears little to no impact on the larger narratives of "success" or "failure".
A few to start with:
-Removal of the filibuster for Judicial nominees in 2013
-The increased use of "acting" cabinet appointments during the Trump admin
-The recent increased use of executive orders
-The introduction of reconciliation in the 1980s in order to circumvent the filibuster
Just to name a few off the top of my head. These all seem fine and good, with no public backlash (and little public awareness). We can reduce the vetocracy, so long as we have the political willpower to do so.
The more salient problem, as you hint at, is that there are ideologies in the U.S. who rather like it this way. Everybody ranks "legislature does thing I like=good, legislature does thing I don't like=bad" in the same way. But the asymmetry here is that one ideology also ranks "legislature does nothing at all = good", which changes the whole game. In a vetoless system, this ideological group may win half the time, but in a legislative vetocracy it's always winning.
You've nailed it.
We have to get rid of the Senate, which is malapportioned and essentially hostile to democracy. It's at the absolute core of the vetocracy.
Robin Hanson has a suggestion to replace the zoning system: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/01/fine-grain-futarchy-zoning-via-harberger-taxes.html
It's understandable that people worry about things changing to worse. However, in theory, we could run a prototype on a small scale, prove that it is working well and then expand once trust is built. The problem is when we are polarized we cannot agree on our evaluation of prototypes' success. Like, a person initially praising Romneycare doesn't extend the same praise to Obamacare. (I've even seen more than one person praising ACA while bashing Obamacare.)
In theory, it seems like you could also instate bans on bans. Imagine, for example, a city that outlawed zoning regulations - beyond just not having any, it actively legislated against such regulations.
If veto powers are a sort of political resource that gets handed out to various interest groups, why don’t we also see “veto vetos” handed out in a similar way? Why isn’t the right to do X as vigorously defended as the right to complain about X?
Well, it is actually. Gun laws get huge pushback from conservatives, who vigorously defend their right to bear arms. We have a right to own property, a right to vote, a right to take pictures of people in public, a right to speak (although I admit it’s under attack, but then again when hasn’t it been?). It seems to me we’ve tended to diminish punitive sentencing over time, expand rights, roll back the war on drugs.
It’s not obvious to me that we exist in a vetocracy, except of course in the arenas of politics that are vetocracies.
Imagine that political/economic life was divided into lots of different independent segments, and they randomly morphed into varying levels of freedom vs restriction over time.
We’d then wind up with a few that are one or even two standard deviations in the “over-restricted” direction. Assuming they were all important, we’d notice these areas and be pissed about it. Likewise with areas that were under-regulated. The middle ground maybe we wouldn’t notice: the food industry seems to get things about right, along with most other consumer goods.
So how can I tell the difference between an over- and under-regulated society *in general*? Because if the underlying model is that asymmetric justice and inaction bias tend to produce over-regulation, we ought to verify this by seeing a general trend in society as a whole. Not just be able to cherry pick areas of the economy that seem catastrophically over-regulated. I’d expect that to happen just by “regulatory drift.”
Switzerland is an interesting counterexample, as they seem to thrive on vetocracy. see Martin Sustrik's article on LessWrong:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x6hpkYyzMG6Bf8T3W/swiss-political-system-more-than-you-ever-wanted-to-know-i
Yes, in Switzerland everybody group or actor, however small, has a say. One would expect that to lead to a blocked decision making process. However, the institution of referendum acts as an anti-festering measure. If the participants can't agree on a nice positive-sum compromise, the issue will be eventually solved by simple majority voting in a referendum. And given that the result of the referendum is uncertain and that the solution is probably not going to be exactly what the most actors would be happy with, there's an actual pressure to make a compromise.
I realise you probably weren't very serious, but the scientific consensus is that cold fusion is straight up impossible. Our Standard Model of particle physics does not allow for it.
Maybe use "commercially viable fusion" instead? Or de novo protein folding or something similar?
I think it's a bit misleading to say "But Congress was able to get by with [the filibuster] for decades, because everyone was polite and cooperative and didn't want to screw things up too badly."
There are two different things referred to as the "filibuster"! The filibuster in the original sense, the sort that required getting up and actually talking to hijack proceedings (the "talking filibuster"), and the "virtual filibuster" or "silent filibuster" that allows you to demand a 3/5 cloture vote even without having to get up and talk. IINM, the virtual filibuster was only introduced in 1975. Prior to that filibustering was a bit more costly. Although a talking filibuster could also be quite costly on the party *not* filibustering, as discussed here: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/02/filibusted.html . So I'm not advocating a return to the talking filibuster, or at least not the talking filibuster as it previously existed. (IMO it should be done away with entirely, but that's a separate matter -- point is if you want to bring back the talking filibuster you also have to fix the problems with it.)
Anyway, point is I'm skeptical that it makes sense to group these two together.
(Note also that the filibuster is purely a Senate phenomenon; the House has never had any filibuster.)
Take a hard vetocracy (e.g. France) vs a mild one (e.g. UK) vs democratically elected dictatorship (e.g. Germany)
Was this blog always soooo much about politics? And in such a US-centric pundit way? I don't remember that being the case.
Where's the data? This is a thing where numbers exist, compile them, compare them.
I miss albion seed style reviews...
Please, please, please don't let some weird hive mind substack mentality of publishing daily driver you towards only publishing things you can write in a day, or if you do, just write fiction.
I sometimes wonder if it would make sense for the government to buy out the interests of a veto group.
Let's imagine an example where the government would like to make it simpler for people to pay their taxes, but there's currently an entrenched industry selling people tax preparation assistance who will obviously lose out if this change is made, and they have enough political clout to block the change.
What if the government says: We realize it's kind of unfair to have your career ruined because of some dumb procedural change. So: Everyone who loses their job due to this change has a permanent guaranteed government job until retirement age. We'll try to find something useful for you to do (first idea: audits!), but even if we can't, we'll still pay you as compensation for destroying your other career.
And hey, we need some place for all these new government employees to work, so let's buy the buildings they already work in, at fair market price (or even slightly above). And we'll also buy their office equipment and any other notable sunk capital investments in the industry.
NOW, you have no reason to veto anymore, and society can go ahead and make this net-beneficial change that would otherwise be vetoed.
Obviously, this costs more (to the government) than just making the change and letting the current industry die. And if you actually had the ability to take that option, then that might be a valid objection. But we've already established that they can effectively veto you, so that option is illusory. (Lots of plans look bad when compared to theoretical alternatives that you can't actually take!)
The relevant comparison is how much it costs compared to the status quo. And since society as a whole is already SOMEHOW paying all of the salaries and capital returns of this whole industry (otherwise it would not exist), it's not obvious that there is any NET cost to paying them through the government instead.
Now, likely paying that rent PLUS the cost of implementing the new tax system will be more expensive. But most of the costs of implementing the new system are probably labor and equipment for the people doing the implementing, and look! we just acquired a bunch of labor and equipment of approximately the right type, for a cost that was already factored into this plan! I bet that offsets a pretty large fraction of the implementation costs of the legal change.
There is also the obvious problem that it's very hard (both politically and practically) to pay for this plan by capturing EXACTLY the money that society was already somehow paying to support this industry. In practice those costs will not be distributed quite the same way as before; SOMEONE will lose out and howl about it. But hopefully not an existing and well-coordinated lobbying group. And this particular veto is gone forever.
And as I am not an expert in ANY of the fields relevant to this proposal, it probably has huge problems that have not occurred to me, which might or might not be solvable.
One issue with any buy-out scheme is that nothing guarantees the rent seekers will stop seeking rent.
In fact, it just produces a new incentive to do so. Get good enough at rent-seeking, and society will buy you out! It’s a little like negotiating with terrorists. Yes, I am apparently comparing Turbo Tax to the Taliban.
It’s a similar problem to the perverse incentives of a safety net. Make enough bad decisions, and society will sponsor your rent and medical bills! I support a safety net, from a moral and economic perspective, but not rent-seeker buyouts. What gives?
The difference to me is that it makes sense to me (parable of the talents) that opportunity is not equally distributed and some people just get hammered with plain old bad luck right in the sweet spot of their economically productive phase of life. You probably do lose a fair amount of economic output when people are tilted away from self-sufficiency into dependency via the safety net, but oh well.
By contrast, corporate rent seekers are smart, hard workers. They know how the big system works and they exploit it in a big way. They could be doing a lot of good if their talents and drive were put to good use. So there should be zero tolerance for high-functioning rent seekers, and non-zero tolerance for low-functioning rent seekers.
Of course, this isn’t the actual world. The real picture is closer to the opposite. Our society quietly tolerates high functioning rent seekers, maybe not online, but where it really counts: at the dinner table. Too many of our friends and relations are deeply invested in one rent seeking industry or another; we’d rather let them pick our pockets than personally attack out friends and relations.
I imagine it’s a little like if you live in a country where the police take bribes. Even if you’re angry about it on one level, you get a whole lot more polite when your uncle the cop comes over for dinner. And not just because you’re scared of his power, but also because you love him.
I'm not sure it's a NEW incentive for rent-seeking--you're paying them the rent that they would have gotten anyway under the status quo. And in my proposal, they only keep the guaranteed salary if they work for the government, so we're not necessarily freeing up any new time for additional rent-seeking. (Plus, the government extracts some labor that would otherwise be spent defending the rent.)
Punishing high-functioning rent-seekers might still be a better option...but only if you can figure out a way to actually ENACT that option in the face of their veto.
Depending on the details of how they accomplish their veto, maybe you could punish a handful of the most egregious offenders while buying out everyone else?
I agree with this. Sorry, I missed your original comment – I have made a similar point less succinctly below. There is a literature in various fields on effectively buying out veto players, which does not seem to be very well known.
And, sorry, one other point is that I think many humans react negatively to a "buy out the rentiers" framing, perhaps because it feels like caving in to a bully: I have found it easier to frame such deals as "share the benefits of fixing the deadweight losses".
My concern is that this arrangement would last more (or possibly much less!) as long as the current group of people the government bought out were working.
It's easy for me to imagine scenarios like the following:
* Unholy alliances of business/lobbyists/politicians break government on purpose to create unnecessary industries, then get guaranteed government jobs for life when the government eventually buys them out.
* Nothing but a changeable "policy" and voters hold back politicians a few years in the future from re-breaking the government to necessitate the industry that just got bought out. If they were able to get away with breaking it in the first place, how confident do we feel that they won't get away with doing it a second time?
* If the buy-out was protected with some sort of iron-clad change, perhaps at the constitutional level, then it hamstrings our flexibility if the government should turn out to do a terrible job.
I'm not sure how to deal with these three objections. So I'd prefer to push against parasite industries through the normal political process, accepting that it's a genuine tradeoff.
I think it's a valid concern but I think it's very hard to think about these questions in the abstract. There are known tools and techniques in the fields of policy analysis and policy studies to create policies that constrain re-breakings of the kind of that you suggest, but I think it's hard to discuss them without looking at specific concrete examples of broken sectors. (I give some references in my main comment.)
Thanks for referring me to it, I'll check it out when I have time. It looks really interesting.
Clement Atlee did it in the UK when they nationalized the railroads, coal mines, etc.
The problem is: this only works on reasonable rent-seekers who just wanted their "cut".
It does not work with lunatics who are hell-bent on power, such as the Republican Party or the slavers before the Civil War.
This is a well-studied phenomenon in public choice economics. Any economically and politically powerful special interests groups grow over time until the stifle any political progress and change. It's a one-way street of increasing institutional entrenchment.
As a proof, you could look towards any high potential country with an educated, healthy, law-abiding workforce, decimate their government and rebuild it from scratch, and you would see huge social development and economic growth. In the Rise and Decline of Nations, Mancur Olson (a left-wing economist) notes that we have a natural experiment in the form of post-WW2 Japan and Germany, both which underwent the treatment and saw what are generally known as "economic miracles", becoming some of the largest economies in the world.
Incidentally, this is exactly what's happening to the technology industry as we speak. Economic theories of industry lifecycles dictate that each industry undergoes a period of initial growth, increasing maturity and regulation, and then stagnation - standard textbook stuff. The Internet was basically an unregulated anarchist paradise where everyone could do whatever they wanted, followed by immense growth of a few companies. Now special interests such as media and government longingly look at all the economic and political power these companies wield, create a moral panic from the mostly made-up, although somewhat real social ills caused by these companies to regulate the industry. New company formation, innovation and economic growth are all already tapering out and will soon cease just as they have in other industries.
I agree that public choice economics has been addressing this issue and warning us of stagnation and sclerosis for decades now. Mancur Olson (Rise and Decline) and Joseph Tainter (The Collapse of Complex Societies) have also been especially insightful.
Over time, organizations and societies become cluttered with rules, bureaucracies, legacy systems, and rent seeking coalitions. This is further complicated by the problem of declining marginal returns. In empires this leads eventually to collapse.
The solutions, imperfect at best, are constructive competition between organizations (federalism), exit options and rights, creative destruction, and new colonies or spin offs.
Public choice economics is tendentious and somewhat dishonest.
There's an obvious way out of the path: voting. Specifically, the Swiss-style simple majority referendum. The *lack* of this -- that's what causes all the problems. If we could bypass the veto points created by things like the malapportioned Senate, we would not have serious problems.
"labor unions forcing terms on companies - all of these are examples of good people trying to prevent bad things in ways that introduce more veto points."
You could resolve this problem by having labour in control of the means of production. This way capitalist would not be able to veto them.
What happens when you get a division within the workers? E.g. if 60% of workers think the other 40% should be fired.
What kind of division are you referring to?
Lets say you have a company that makes both shoes and socks. The 60% of employees on the shoe side decide that the company should move to making just shoes, so vote to fire the people on the sock side. That analogous to cases in politics people are concerned about for "tyranny of majority", and the justification for having veto points, etc. (I'm assuming that "labour controlling the means of production" means some sort of cooperative model here).
Why would they decide to make only shoes? What is the material reason for the division between these two groups of workers?
"We've got a problem where we can't make things happen because different factions disagree on what to do."
"Ooh! You can solve that problem by giving one faction absolute power!"
Yes, that's true. Not only will the proletariat be given absolute power, the capitalist class will no longer exist as a category. This is similar to how we solved the problem of slavery. Eventually you have to get rid of slave-holders as a class.
My point as been entirely missed. (My fault; I was rather oblique.)
Your proposal has no hope of generalizing to the many, many other examples of vetocracy, because "pick one faction and give them 100% of the power" is not a remotely acceptable solution in MOST contexts. So insofar as this addresses vetocracy at all, it only addresses one tiny special case of it.
And even within the context of that tiny special case, this is a preposterous solution. Not because it wouldn't work, or even because it would be a bad idea, but because it is wildly disproportionate to the problem under discussion.
It's like suggesting we could cure someone's acne through mind uploading. Mind uploading could, in fact, cure your acne, and perhaps there's a case to be made for mind uploading *as a policy*...but if you made a list of the best arguments, "it would cure your acne" would not be in the top hundred. It would be utterly ridiculous for someone's position on mind uploading to be swayed by an argument about how it would cure acne.
It would be similarly ridiculous for someone's opinion on Marxist revolutions to be swayed by "it would solve one tiny special case of vetocracy".
This makes it look like you don't actually care about vetocracy, and just want an excuse to trot out your hobby horse.
This is a strawman argument. I never claimed it would solve all problems of "vetocracy" - rather that it is the only solution to the class struggle between capital and labour.
It wasn't your fault that your point was missed by that commenter. They're seemingly just incapable of noticing some points.
Sure. How about whichever one wins the vote?
One does have to prohibit attempts to interfere with the voting by preventing people from voting, refusing to count the votes, trying to stop the election entirely,... such as Republicans try to do routinely
I live in New Zealand. Our national government can do whatever the hell it likes and has zero veto points other than a desire to get re-elected every 3 years. There is no constitution, when the courts rule they have done something illegal they can just ignore it, they routinely interfere with local government on a fundamental level, there is no upper house, there is no presidential veto (de facto).
New Zealand also has an acute case of can't-build-anything-itis. The most serious crisis here at the moment isn't covid, it's a major shortfall of houses and extreme price rises (especially considering our low population density). It does not end there as major infrastructure projects have virtually ground to a halt over the last 30 years.
Neoliberalism is strongest in the Anglo countries and I'd advise looking there for comparisons first. Ideology is what is keeping politicians from doing stuff.
This gets more directly to what I was thinking when I posted about whether the shrinking size of the federal government in terms of employment might mean for getting things done.
Ideologically, the federal government ceased somewhere around Reagan to be seen as a force for good, big, useful projects.
I don't know that it is true that infrastructure projects have "virtually ground to a halt". We're building new wind farms, for example, and the Waikato Expressway should be complete late this year. Looking at the NZTA web site, I see plenty of other roading work underway around the country.
Perhaps I'm just not thinking big enough. Can you give an example of one or two major infrastructure projects that you think we should be doing now but aren't?
Has the national government actually tried to, e.g. build more houses in a specific city, and actually made as much progress as, even deciding what exact properties they'd seize by eminent domain?
I predict not – but I'm not that confident and I'm curious too!
I don't think we'd put up with that sort of abuse of eminent domain. It isn't as if there isn't room for our cities to expand.
There's information about ongoing state housing work at https://kaingaora.govt.nz/developments-and-programmes/what-were-building/large-scale-projects/ if you are interested. Granted, what I'm seeing there doesn't seem enough to make much of a dent in demand.
> I don't think we'd put up with that sort of abuse of eminent domain.
That's why I was skeptical about the OC's claim:
> Our national government can do whatever the hell it likes and has zero veto points other than a desire to get re-elected every 3 years.
What do you think the biggest bottleneck is for building more housing in NZ?
No idea. Perhaps there aren't enough trained builders?
The original claim is close enough to true. In extreme cases, Parliament might intervene - as happened in Britain recently - but that would be extremely unusual. Our government isn't usually that sociopathic anyway.
My prior is NIMBY-ism, but maybe it takes different forms in NZ.
The Resource Management Act may be a factor, but I don't know much about it.
This seems like evidence in favour of your prior: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/labour-and-national-join-forces-for-housing-crisis-fix-ending-decades-of-standoff/Z27M7UF7QFO4RMLNR7UQBQERZI/
Too early I guess to say whether it counts as evidence against Korakys' skepticism.
New Zealand did, however, stop Covid. Which the US couldn't do partly because of *veto points* and partly because of deranged propaganda.
I think treating this as a consequence of polarization is wrong. Conservatives want less checks, Democrats more. 2-out-1-in regulatory approaches are very popular with right wing governments around the world. Boris Johnson implemented simplified zoning and planning laws. Not saying there aren't drawbacks, but if you're looking to deregulate you clearly have more allies on the right.
Right-wingers never deregulate. They pretend to, but instead they put in a lot of cronyist regulations: "help my buddies, obstruct my opponents".
I should say right-wingers in the US. In Europe and the UK some of the right-wingers are more legitimate. In the US, right-wingers have just been flat-out liars since Reagan, or perhaps Nixon.
The most surprising thing is that people often seem to neglect the non-zero-sum nature of many of these problems, and how much potentially easier that should make it to solve them.
A sector with a huge deadweight loss is often an opportunity to create large amounts of value and share that value with enough of the veto players to get reform through – see e.g. Michael Trebilcock's work on transitional gains traps –
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/dealing-with-losers-9780190456948
or Michael Weimer's work on policy analysis: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-1338.1992.tb00479.x
One of Trebilcock's key points is that just making the veto player's entitlements tradeable (alienable) can sometimes help to reduce or eliminate the deadweight loss.
Another underused technique is "layering" to add an innocuous policy that will snowball over time, like the initial introduction of 401(k) plans and IRA accounts: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/beyond-continuity-9780199280469
The space of policy options is almost infinitely dimensioned so it should very often be possible to assemble a bundle of policies that will unite a winning coalition for change (see William Riker's "heresthetic", and pp. 61-65 of this https://www.macmillanihe.com/page/detail/Rational-Choice/?K=9781137427410).
To some extent the rise in veto points may be an aspect of Demsetz's points about increasing demand for protection against externalities as technology increases: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1821637?seq=1
The problem is that many of our legal systems for protecting against externalities are highly vulnerable to blame avoidance by officials: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0143814X00004219 . Methods of direct democratic decision with qualified majority, especially at the very smallest scales possible (ideally only a few people) might provide a way to overcome those veto powers and re-enable Coasean bargaining, as I argue for zoning here: https://www.mercatus.org/publications/urban-economics/fixing-urban-planning-ostrom-strategies-existing-cities-adopt-0, kindly recommended by Tyler https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/07/street-by-street-zoning.html
As you have pointed out there are other sectors like education and healthcare which plausibly seem to have enormous deadweight losses. Government has grown massively in extent and complexity but we have not yet evolved good institutions to find sectors of large deadweight losses and seek to improve regulations on an as near to win-win basis as possible.
There arguments why it may be hard for government to fix those, relating for example to credible commitment problems, which I summarize in that Mercatus piece above [from Lee J. Alston and Bernardo Mueller, “Property Rights and the State,” in Handbook of New Institutional Economics, ed. Claude Ménard and Mary M. Shirley (Berlin: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2008), 573–90] but I don't think those are insurmountable.
This piece in Works in Progress argues that these problems are highly significant for Progress Studies, with a flag to various sectors where it seems to be relevant: https://worksinprogress.co/progress-studies-the-hard-question/
The current political political players may be acting entirely rationally – their support base may make it difficult for them to frame issues as non-zero-sum, for example – but that doesn't mean that others outside the system e.g. EA or Progress Studies people could not make headway by designing policies that will help to create a new Schelling point around which a coalition can form. I think it would be good if these techniques were more widely known within those movements.
Oh, these are all really good points. It reminds me of Hernando de Soto's work which, boiled down to a blog post comment is 'give people titles or deeds to their shantytown shacks'.
I often think that that might be a good way to 'fix' car parking rules (i.e. mostly get rid of the common mandatory minimums here in the U.S.). Street parking tho is a little hard to hand out titles too – maybe a simple lottery of registered voters or some other kind of official list of residents.
Some "veto player's entitlements" are much more nebulous than others – there's often not a clear enough delineation of which piece of the overall entitlement 'belongs' to which individuals, but who has the entitlement at all (or to what degree).
And of course the handing out of the entitlements is yet another thing which itself can be vetoed!
That's a bit of the rub with a lot of this otherwise cool research. In the end, any implementation is just politics too. There's no escape!
Yes, I agree. It's very hard to get something passed as "buying out the veto players" – much more effective to frame it as something else that achieves the same effect, e.g. https://www.manhattan-institute.org/hyperlocal-zoning-enabling-growth-block-and-street
In parking reform, Professor Donald Shoup's ideas can also be seen as a way to buy out the incumbent veto players – the fact that they are not framed that way has made it easier for them to be adopted in various places. If designed well the formalisation of the entitlements won't make anyone worse off, so it is simply a question of ensuring that objections stemming from non-economic concerns are not aroused. https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated-ebook/dp/B08R2CQX79/
When the veto player's desire is some combination of white supremacy, patriarchy/misogyny, and personal power, there's no deal to be made with them. They're either not rational or so focused on personal power for the purposes of abuse that there's nothing reasonable to be done with them. You can't buy them out because they don't want money; they want things you can't compromise on.
This is the Senate Republicans.
Increasing risk-aversion among individuals is another big factor to throw in.
i.e. it feels to me that people have become more risk-averse over the last few decades. We (on average) care more about being safe from bad things than on creating good things.
If that's the case (presumably data exists somewhere), then the vetocracy would just be giving the people what they want.
There might still be ways to square the circle. The LW crowd seem even more risk-averse than the general population, but still keen on making big projects happen. I'm just not sure where the secret sauce is in that.
If I recall correctly risk aversion increases with age so we might expect a population that is becoming older on average to become more risk averse.
First, I think there's a massive conflation that Ezra has been making on vetocracy Vs polarisation and that's a big reason his thesis doesn't really hold up once you add a) all the other issues that were polarising us before but aren't now like religion, b) the issues that are central to identity but aren't polarising, and c) international political Polarisation in other countries which have also seen rise in far right movements. This was my biggest issue with Why We're Polarised too, as I'd written in my strange loop canon commentary.
Secondly, the vetocracy issue is a feature of the system. We have democratic rulemaking, a (sensible) worry about negative events and a bias for action. Which means we can only keep adding new rules rather than remove them. There's no incentive to not be NIMBY other than "being a good citizen", but that's not nearly strong enough to overcome this collective action problem. All decisions have tradeoffs, and if we're solely focused on win-win decisioning hen of course we'll get stuck in a local minima.
It's also a self fulfilling prophecy, because if I thought the construction of a high speed rail was great, but it will take fifteen years, I wouldn't want it near my house either.
My preferred solution is to introduce more negative veto points, like a benevolent czar who's been appointed, to power through by not needing to make every decision subject to individual veto - focus on exit instead of voice in Hirschman's parlance. But even that won't work for things like NY rail. We should also be using wayyyy more sunset provisions in our bills, to reduce the regulatory quagmire. They won't solve the problem of making people want to build extra housing and reduce their property values, but that too we can solve with more infrastructure (schools, amenities, transport links) etc.
So to me there are 3 attack vectors
1. Make decision making easier - a bit more benevolent dictatorship
2. Reduce the number of roadblocks - sunset provisions in law, killing bills, reducing regulatory complexity, an empowered agency to curtail the other agencies?
3. Technology - if making a railway took 1 year instead of 15, just might make things happen faster.
There's a book called, "American Nations," by someone named Colin Woodard. He actually wrote about this issue a little bit in his book, but the basic gist is that at the time the constitution was widely adopted by the colonies and was expanding to territories in the early 19th century, it was geared towards giving distinct ethnic/cultural groups specific veto powers in order to induce them to join the union. Basically, puritans were thrown done bones, the dutch were thrown some bones, Southerners were thrown some bones, the Germans, the Quakers, etc. The reality is that these groups don't naturally get along, or really trust each other, which means that a political coalition among them would be tenuous at best. In the early days of the federal government, land was plentiful and population density was exceptionally low. Now, the various cultures are geographically intermixed and population density has increased dramatically since then. Thus, it shouldn't be surprising that political entities at all levels have created new veto points since that was and is what basically keeps the population from separating. Essentially, veto power exists to defer dealing with the problem of cultural disassociation and the consequent dissolution of the union.
I don't buy the premise about what the US could be doing. It also could be doing much worse. Does Ezra read the tweets of the people that happen to get into positions of power?
So the richer society => more status quo bias seems reasonable to me. But I also think it’s a function of an aging (and even older electorate) creates a status quo bias. Our politicians themselves are also super old (partly reflecting the electorate, partly pay often sucks vs alternatives so it’s an end of career activity, electorate doesn’t like change so name recognition wins?). I find myself less interested in new slightly more optimized ways to do things as I get older.
The build more housing crowd for example is mostly young people who see their generation unable to afford houses. If the country’s demographics were younger they would have more clout. Granted thinking about “when did TFP slow down” doesn’t line up neatly with baby boomers aging, so that makes me a little less confident in the thesis.
The first step should be moving to a loser pays legal system. I was just reading about a wind turbine proposal and how all the local busy bodies filed lawsuits to stop it. Now these are upper middle class people who can spend $25k on a lawyer to file a frivolous lawsuit. But if they faced the prospect of losing their house if they lost the case and had to pay the oppositions legal bills, we’d have a lot fewer lawsuits.
In reading about how the cost to build rail, roads, wind turbines, power plants etc are vastly higher in the US than in other advanced countries one of the major factors is the cost of litigation.
That seems like a recipe for making the legal system to expensive for poor people to use.
With the rapid expanse of mandatory arbitration is that actually an issue?
Are there more medical errors in Germany or the Netherlands than in the US?
In New Zealand medical errors are ha fled by a system similar to workman’s comp. Is that better?
Perhaps the opposite! Right now, poor people have to pay their own way through the court system even if they are unequivocally on the correct side of the law. In a loser-pays system, poor people could at least afford to fight winnable cases more often.
Right now lawyers take winnable cases on contingency. Presumably lawyers would need to be 99% sure they will win vs the current 95% if they knew that losing would mean no money for them and paying the opposite sides legal fees.
Right now the only thing a lawyer risks taking a case on contingency is his time.
His time, and his staff's time, which he has to pay for even if they lose, and rent on the law offices that were put to such ultimately unproductive use, etc. So we know that successful law firms have pockets deep enough to cover reasonable legal expenses for a lost case, and since I don't think most law firms go out of business if they lose two cases in a row, they should be able to cover both side's reasonable legal expenses in one case.
Long term, if you're taking cases where you're even 51% likely to win, "We win, we get a reasonable judgement and reasonable legal fees, we lose and we pay the other side's reasonable fees" has a better expected return than "if we win, we have to cover our own fees out of the reasonable judgement". If the short-term variability is a problem, that's what insurance is for and lawsuit insurance could certainly be a thing (already sometimes of is, on the defense side).
There's lots of ways for friction to creep into the system, so you'd need to set your threshold higher than 51% to make a long-term profit. And so there's lots of fun and interesting questions in how to set up the system to minimize that friction. But "poor people and their contingency-fee lawyers couldn't afford the risk" isn't a reason to roundfile the idea on principle.
I think a part of the problem is that congress is broken. Lots of reasons for this... talked about many places. The major problem is tribalism. No one wants to help the other side get something done. I'm constantly reminded of "Death Throws of the Republic" the series of history podcasts from Dan Carlin. We are at a point where party matters more than country. My short term solution is to vote for candidates who are veterans. (they have shown some signs of putting country first... I know shades of "Starship Troopers" by RAH.) Long term I hope for a third party, that can maybe force congress to take back it's power and do it's job. (Third parties seem to be losing power though... sigh)
Justin Amash has tweeted repeatedly about the concentration of power in the US Congress to a few leaders. Compromise and bi-partisan efforts have a higher hurdle to clear than before the rules changed to give the leaders their power. Partisanship is now structural and probably why the legislative is largely theater and the executive rules by fiat.
The major problem is quite simply the malapportioned US Senate, which allows a small minority of the population (who can be manipulated easily by buying up rural radio and TV stations) to veto everything.
Since I agree with Steven Pinker that the world has been quite drastically improving each and every decade for a long time, I fail to see the riddle.
The systems we have are much better than the system that we had 50 years ago. If we want to improve them, then this is naturally harder. Regulations are part of this.
It was very easy to build a crappy car 50 years ago and sell it. If the brakes failed, then the people die, and you shrugged it off because people died all the time from car accidents. Today, people don't die anymore. Approximately zero people die from car accidents. This is actually a pretty precise approximation when you compare with 1970. So nowadays, when you want to build a car, you need to meet the requirement that brakes must not fail. It's not just a recommendation, there is actually a regulation that ensures this. But even without regulation, it is just much harder to build a car that meets the high standards of other car companies.
The same also holds for institutions. They are incredibly much better than 50 years ago. Look at mental asylums now and then. Schools. Hospitals. Do you really want to be treated in a hospital with 1970 standards, even if they had access to modern drugs?
But that means that changing them for the better is harder now. Not because someone wants to prevent you from doing things, but just because of diminishing returns. I like to picture it as an energy landscape -- the deeper you are in a sink, the further you need to move to find an even better one.
In my eyes, the increasing amount of regulations are symptom, because they (should) basically encode all the directions in which you will make things worse. Of course, they are a proxy, and can go wrong. And sometimes the overall level of regulation is not right, so that we have over- or underregulation. So we should put effort into making the right regulations, and the right amount.
But in principle, if we live in an improving world, we should expect the number of regulations go up.
> Approximately zero people die from car accidents.
I don't think that's true at all. IIRC, auto accidents are the _leading_ cause of death for infants or toddlers in the U.S..
From [Motor vehicle fatality rate in U.S. by year - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year):
> In 2010, there were an estimated 5,419,000 crashes, 30,296 deadly, killing 32,999, and injuring 2,239,000.
They are, inevitably, incredibly dangerous to operate or even be near (when in operation). We _could_ make cars (and similar vehicles) much safer – see road rally cars for an 'existence proof' – but approximately no one would accept the hassle required to reach that level of safety.
Interesting. For Germany, it's absolutely true. The number of traffic fatalities peaked around 1970 (21,000), and decreased to 3,000 in 2019. (For comparison, 3000 = Covid death toll of 3 days at peak.) And since 1970, the number of people grew from 60 Mio to 80 Mio, and the number of cars tripled. So the number of deaths per 100,00 cars went down from 100 to 5. That is very close to zero when you start from 100.
The numbers for the US are perhaps a bit less impressive. The number of fatalities per population (or per car) is 3 times higher than in Germany. And Germany ranks only in the middle in Europe.
I think part of the problem is that vetos are so easy to exercise, and many are even automatic (in the form of prohibitive fixed costs). I wonder if there's a consistent way to make vetos themselves more costly, so that they are deployed to prevent atrocities but not out of casual spite or signalling.
Maybe things like 'you have to run an environmental impact proposal before building IF someone submits a petition with 1000 local signatures requesting it within 1 month of announcing the build' or 'Every Senator gets to filibuster exactly once during their Senate career, after that they may be removed from the floor if they try it again.'
I imagine that the problems which cause vetocracy will find ways to route around these restrictions, of course. But maybe an attitude that favors theses types of common-sense restrictions on the power of vetoes would be able to gain enough support to actively fight those forces over the long term, where the attitude that says 'no regulations ever don't tread on me taxation is theft' fails to capture public support.
What I see happening in The Netherlands is a really weird dynamic where laws are adopted that have significant consequences, but these get passed with very little opposition by politicians, nor very much debate. Subsequently, the executive tries really hard to not follow the law, by coming up with all kinds of loopholes or cheats, but this seems to often be supported by a majority of the legislative. It can't be explained by checks and balances, when politicians refuse to back the laws they passed themselves.
I think that the Dutch legislative branch is fundamentally broken. It certainly operates very differently from the past in objectively measurable ways. For example, the tour of duty of the Dutch House of Representatives (which leads in lawmaking) has declined immensely, to 6 years. Half of them last only 4 years, which is a single term. So the level of experience is appalling and the incentives to pass a law that promises the moon, but at enormous costs to other important things, or to not fix structural problems that require unpopular solutions, are immense.
They've adopted new rules that allow a smaller group of legislators to call for an emergency session, which rapidly got abused so it takes month before an emergency session can be scheduled. Recently, even the media has started complaining about their own short term focus, where they have a symbiosis with politicians who proudly go on TV to explain how horrible the latest incident is and who make all kinds of hollow promises, only to make the exact opposite promises for the next incident, when that incident is blamed on the opposite problem.
I think that something broke politics and that it probably has something to do with how politicians get treated, changing their incentives from choosing a long term career as a politician and to take ownership of problems, to far more short term oriented behavior.
I'm not convinced that an increase in Nimbyism is the cause, because my country has done it's best to make it very hard to go against the government. Basically, only professionally organized NGOs tend to have a chance. Yet that legislation doesn't seem to have had a significant positive effect. Many problems aren't even at the level where veto's can work. For example, government IT problems are a major cause of making it impossible to do things, which are often to blame on completely unreasonable demands by legislators & the executive, who demand an unreasonable level of complexity from such systems (and change their demands along the way). No citizen gets a veto over such IT projects, nor are there environmental laws in play.
It may be helpful to see constitutional democracy as a peaceful alternative to civil war.
When civil war is a risk or a reality, a common approach is to match institutional vetoes to major players ("potential spoilers") at that time. The key is to give major players (defined as those who could throw everyone into civil war) some payoff to stay peaceful, and a veto so that their payoff can't be taken away. In theory, this means that major players will (a) prefer peace to civil war, (b) be protected from one another, and (c) see changes to the status quo as consensual. ABC segment gets privileged access to tax dollars; DEF gets licenses to extract natural resources; XYZ gets recognition for some other property rights. My co-author Michael and I call this the "chronic challenge."
One problem is that the status quo changes on its own. Oil prices fall. The economy goes into a recession. Demographic change happens. A once powerful segment loses an iconic leader, and falls into division. If a new major player doesn't have a stake in the system, and a veto to protect itself, it may throw the system into civil war. Particularly, if a once major player has lost size or status, but still reaps disproportionate gains. We call this the "constitutive challenge."
Now layer in the opportunities to "build", to solve problems in an agile, adaptive way in the near term. The structures that protect us from one another can impede our ability to respond gracefully to the environment. We call this the "acute challenge."
So we have three different time scales of action, putting different demands on the system:
- Near term: we want agility to solve problems ("the acute challenge")
- Medium term: we need major players to have a stake in the system ("the chronic challenge")
- Long term: we need to gracefully reallocate vetoes as power + identity of major players shifts ("constitutive challenge")
It's a lot.
In theory, a constrained executive + a collaborative legislature can walk the line here. In practice, it's not so simple. We are witnessing the breakdown of that theory.
Veto-based systems can tip into brinkmanship and other ugly bargaining behaviors. Or delegate their authority to the executive when they control it. The executive, in turn, can use their power to act unilaterally to loosen the constraints on them.
There are better ways to build trust being opposing elites.
I would go on, but my 6 yo is wanting me to play tag.
If you're interested, Michael and I have a paper on "Trust in the Executive" that you can find here:https://michael-weintraub.squarespace.com/research1
I feel like a lot of this discussion is too abstract. What specifically should we be building? Why aren't we? And what can we do?
1: Housing: Zoning laws set up perverse incentives. The only people who seem to have any say is the people who stand to lose something. The people who would like to buy more housing and move in don't get a say. It's easy to say zoning should be more permissive, but it's unclear how to actually convince NIMBY communities to allow this.
2: Energy infrastructure: It's unclear to me that there is actually a problem? We already have a cheap source of energy. It's hard to displace that without making new renewable energy not just cheaper, but so cheap that's it's actually worthwhile to uproot the current system.
3: COVID tests: That was a unique technical screw up, not an incentive or a veto problem, and the problem has been more than solved for months. We have more tests than states are using.
4: Ventilators, PPE: These problems have been solved for months. If anything these are a testament to our current economic strength. I doubt that an America in the 1980s could have solved an acute ventilator shortage in mere months. And it's difficult to build a system that would already have enough ventilators on hand. Equipment that is not being used is a waste - it takes up storage space, it needs to be maintained, money spent on it could have been better invested elsewhere.
5: ICU beds: This is a genuinely difficult problem because ICU beds (and all of the respiratory therapist, nursing, sanitation, physician, technician and pharmacist staffing that goes along with it), is really freaking expensive. We could lower barriers to entry in all of those professions. Get rid of the bachelors degree as a requirement for more specialized fields.
7: Flying cars and supersonic flight: Is that a joke? They are too expensive - so the demand is insufficient to justify investment. The Concord failed because they weren't profitable. They would have eventually withered away even if it weren't for the infamous crash. Not a veto problem.
With respect to ventilators, I think that it is not really a case of the nation's being able or unable to marshal the resources to build them. Perhaps it could have, but it turned out that they weren't actually needed. The experts who were using or planning to use the power of the federal government in a way of which Ezra Klein would presumably have approved to acquire needed ventilators got it wrong. ICU bed shortages were rare, highly localized, very temporary and had (as near as I can tell) a very minor impact on fatalities. The US had ample capacity to build COVID tests. The regulators wouldn't let that capacity be used until their own failures to produce a test became manifest. When we carefully examine Klein's specific examples of failure circa April 2020 they are all either, as you say, "a joke" or simply wrong. So why spend a bunch of effort trying to fix a problem we can't prove to a reasonable certainty actually exists?
When people are optimistic about the future, they try to make that future a reality by building. When people are pessimistic about the future, they try to prevent that future from becoming reality by clinging to the past. I think a lot of the political will for exercising veto power is rooted in America's growing pessimism about the future.
I've been reading a lot of classic science fiction from the 1940s - 1960s recently. The optimism jumps off the page. Most of it's not utopian -- there are still lots of challenges -- but they're still confident about progress.
Contrast that with a scenario that played out this fall in the small town of 30,000 where I live in the Shenandoah Valley. This town has a lot of late 19th / early 20th century homes and buildings near the downtown core. They're mostly Queen Anne Victorian's with some facsimile's of continental European styles thrown in. Some are kept up nicely, others aren't (more on that in a bit).
The old county courthouse is a kind of neo-classical mishmash (I'm not an architectural historian -- it's got Corinthian columns, a dome, and a brick facade). The county says it needs to expand the courthouse and proposed a plan to the city to build an ugly 5-story neoclassical mishmash of Corinthian columns, a brick facade, and glass, adjacent to the existing courthouse. Some old, tiny office buildings that used to be used by the "barristers" would have been torn down.
Almost overnight "Save Our Downtown!" yard signs started popping up all over town. There was a huge public outcry. How could they build this eyesore in the middle of our lovely downtown?!?! We have to preserve historical character of our city!
The historical preservation commission rejected the plan. Who knows what'll happen next.
This isn't about protecting the environment or helping the poor and the vulnerable. This is about the aesthetic preferences of a bunch of upper middle class people who are quite happy that the townsfolk of 150-100 years ago experimented with a range of eclectic styles that were considered modern at the time, but who decided to put an end to those experiments circa 1970 and now want to live in a museum rather than a vibrant, growing, risk-taking city.
That's the exact opposite of helping the poor and the vulnerable. The Victorian houses that aren't in good condition stay that way because the historical preservation commission makes renovations too expensive for anyone not in the upper middle class, while also making it impossible to tear them down and build something new and affordable.
It's a petty tyranny of people who think our best days are behind us. That's how I've experienced vetocracy.
But the real tragedy is that younger generations who would normally push back against this mindset and carry society into the future, kicking and screaming if necessary, *also* are convinced America's best days are behind it. I can't *totally* blame them -- they were told that as long as they went to college they would be successful, but also that they could do and be anything they wanted. So a whole lot of people amassed a whole lot of debt getting degrees that weren't that valuable, and then they got out into the real world and decided the future wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Unfortunately, their way of fixing things is just a return to the failed ideas of the past.
Ross Douthat's book "The Decadent Society" captures this nicely, albeit through the lens of his Catholic moral sensibilities.
Maybe it's inevitable that institutions and societies become sclerotic once they reach a certain level of comfort, and then the sclerosis leads to slower growth, which leads to pessimism about the future, which leads people to pine after a mythical Golden Age, which leads to more sclerosis, which leads to...
I actually *am* optimistic about the future. There is so, so much potential for huge improvements in material, social, emotional, and psychological well being in my lifetime. But I'll admit that the rut that polarization, or vetocracy, or decadence, or whatever you want to call it gets me down sometimes, especially over the last year. And I'm really concerned that neither America nor any other western-style democracy will be the leaders of the major advances of the next century, and that makes it even harder to be optimistic, because the current alternative seems to be places governed by authoritarians that trample over individual rights in service of their definition of the collective good.
I still think we can break out of it, though it might take a good solid kick in the ass (COVID?). But It takes a deliberate effort to remain optimistic these days. Which is all the more reason to stop building copies of 18th and 19th century buildings!
The point about the change in science fiction is interesting. I stopped reading new science fiction maybe twenty years ago precisely because it had all gotten too depressing for my tastes, and more recently I watched the new Star Trek Picard series and was struck by the change from a basically utopian to a basically dystopian view of the future. The latest season of Discovery was pretty bad too. (Compare this 2013 description https://www.egscomics.com/comic/2013-01-16 from El Goonish Shive.)
I had been thinking of it as a change in fashion, but perhaps it really does reflect a more pessimistic view of the future from society in general?
(On the other hand, Star Wars seems about the same as ever.)
I think modern Star Trek and Star Wars are two sides of the same pessimistic coin. Dystopia for the nihilists, nostalgia for the escapists.
Picard might be a fusion of both (I didn't watch it, so I'll have to take your word that's dystopian). I mean, it's bringing back characters from 30 years ago!
Your observation about new science fiction taking a turn around 20 years ago is interesting. That's about the time I remember "dark" and "gritty" movies and TV becoming popular, supposedly because they were more serious, mature, and realistic. For a while I thought it was a reaction to 9/11 and the Bush years, but now I'm thinking the roots run deeper.
(Anyone that watched Babylon 5 will know that you can take a more realistic view of the future without being dark)
I agree with your impression of science fiction, that it turned from optimism to pessimism. Out of curiosity, I popped over to a science fiction forum to see if they've ever discussed it, and they have: https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/578886/
Turns out some sci fi nerds agree with the impression, but others disagree. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know who's right.
Well, science fiction does sometimes pay attention to science, as it is generally written people with an interest in science.
And things are looking pretty bad right now, what with the world failing to stop global warming.
You can find the same pessimistic sci-fi from the period when they were worried about nuclear annihiliation, of course.
One issue I have with this is you seem to be regarding "the government" at too high a level. At least in the US there is a fundamental and structurally intended difference between the branch of the government that generates regulations pursuant to validly passed statutes (e.g. the executive branch) and the branch that enacts the statutes (e.g. the legislative branch). For a variety of historical reasons the structural veto points in our system are at the legislative level and not in the executive branch. This would help explain why you get ever increasing use of regulatory powers while simultaneously not being able to pass new laws. Also because the Executive is less constrained and is incentivized to actually try and get things done for the electorate they constantly push their powers towards the practical and theoretical limit.
I'm not sure the conclusions you draw from Ezra are the same conclusions he draws. You seem to suggest that since our institutions are failing, we need to find a way to work around these failing institutions, since they are destined to fail. Ezra, on the other hand, argues that our institutions are failing because they are configured in such a way that leads them to fail. While compromise use to be possible, current levels of polarization mean that the opposition no longer has an incentive to compromise, and pays no political price for obstructing action. As a result, the American system of checks and balances, which use to work, needs to be reformed so that stuff can get done. Simple reforms include eliminating the filibuster, reforming the electoral college, and broadening the Senate so it is more representative (a good start would be to grant statehood to DC and PR). Once you allow elected government to actually implement an agenda, then stuff gets done. And if their policies fail, or are unpopular, they are held accountable by the electorate: the fear of a "throw the bums out" reaction works pretty well as an incentive for the government in power to "do the right thing". On the other hand, getting things done, if it is the right thing and is popular, will be rewarded by the electorate with a renewed mandate to continue to get things done. It become a virtuous cycle, where incentives work as they should: that is, good works that are popular get rewarded and bad work that is unpopular gets punished. In short, I think Ezra would argue that institutional reform, not blockchain, is the answer.
In regards to your third point, my understanding of the seeming discrepancy between the general conception that "government can't do things" and the simultaneous growth of regulation is largely due to the ever increasing power of regulatory agencies to craft the regulations they carry out. So while Congress may have trouble accomplishing much, the RAs continue to do their thing as they aren't generally constrained, or at least not to the same degree, as the factors that inhibit Congress - whether that's largely due to vetocracy or any other force.
Add in the ever growing unilateral powers of the presidency, government overall can still do a lot, both good and bad (depending on your viewpoint), while simultaneously appearing like they "can't do anything" because Congress frequently has trouble passing legislation, whether it's for something every Congressperson claims to want (e.g. "addressing infrastructure") or one of its actual core functions, like passing a real budget.
So if you define a "libertarian paradise" to be a system in which the government does little to nothing, even though it appears our "government can't do anything," the absence of this "libertarian paradise" (among other reasons) is despite the frequent failings of Congress, on net government continues to grow, which in turn typically means a growth in the burdens it imposes.
The federal government work force has steadily shrunk relative to U.S. population over the last 50 years (https://ourpublicservice.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/FedFigures_FY18-Workforce.pdf) and is smaller than most OECD countries relative to population. I wonder if this is a factor? To what extent is the government hamstringing itself by trying to accomplish ambitious projects without adequate staffing?
Has this public sector shrinking happened at state and local levels too?
Japan seems to have a comparably small public sector as the U.S. at around 6% of total employment. Do they get more done despite that? If so, how?
Much of the conversation here has focused on majority v. minority political dynamics. I'm skeptical that political polarization is in fact a primary cause of vetocracy escalation.
With respect to 'building things' I would argue that dynamics of the administrative state, not the political state, are the more relevant enabler. In the US the only branch of federal government that actually makes stuff is the administrative state within the executive branch. The judicial branch obviously plays a major role in resolving procedural conflict - calling the vetoes - but it doesn't make stuff.
In the administrative sphere we have anointed civil service bureaucracies to act as permanent guardians of those less powerful / minority interests - notably the EPA, FTC and Dept of Labor. As noted elsewhere, those entities have copious incentives to expand both the scope of their jurisdiction and the quantity of regulation. Conversely, they have zero incentive to prune, edit and streamline their regulations. Said another way, it is easier for these agencies to promulgate new regulations than to eliminate or reform existing ones.
These bureaucratic realities raise an interesting question: is the common interest being held hostage by an empowered minority with an intractable anti-growth, don't-build-stuff bias? While I share no ground with the Qanon description of a 'deep state', it is necessary to unpack the culture of the administrative branch if you want to diagnose vetocractic creep.
Despite endless attempts by political appointees to fundamentally change the administrative focus of such agencies, each one clearly retains a core (protective) bias (that arguably aligns best with one political tribe). After said reform efforts, the focus of the agency quickly reverts to the pro-regulatory, expansive ambitions mean. Compounding this problem are the numerous historical examples of administrative agencies expanding the scope of the regulatory purview via unilateral 're-interpretation' of the law (e.g. EPA and Clean Water Act). As a Bush v. Trump comparison demonstrates, political appointees can't really alter the expansive-tending-DNA of these agencies. Instead, per Trump, the more effective way to blunt their bias is to dismantle, de-fund and/or de-legitimize their very existence.
Last argument - in the context of building stuff, local NIMBY veto power is far more relevant that political polarization / national political dynamics. How many planned bridges, railways, overpasses, transit lines etc. have been tanked by local opposition rather than federal regulations? When it comes to making stuff (pharma, mfg, GMO's) federal regulation is clearly the more relevant veto, which brings us back to administrative DNA.
> The crypto solution, which has yet to fully mature, is something like “create structures which it’s impossible for anyone, including the creator, to change”.
This is not a good description of how crypto governance works. A more apt metaphor is that you have an unelected oligarchy (the dev team) that controls its own admission and makes all the laws. Then you have a confederation of… states? corporations? — the mining nodes — which implement those laws and monitor their peers to ensure that they'll all implementing them faithfully, and restrain lawbreakers from having any influence. The sole check on oligarchical power is that any node or group of nodes always have the right to secede and then create or follow some different group of oligarchs. In practice it's more often the threat, rather than the execution of this remedy which keeps the oligarchy in line and implementing some reasonable approximation of the will of the people.
Heh, now that I put it this way it sounds vaguely like NRx, doesn't it? I never thought of it that way until just now.
The problem with crypto, and any other technological solution to a social problem, is that it only works when people buy into it, and legitimacy is the underlying problem that politcal systems need to solve. You could have the most optimal system you like, but people still have to be willing to follow the results
Possible systems of government can vary in how much legitimacy they require to sustain themselves. At one extreme you could have a "government" that can only do anything by unanimous consent and such consent can be revoked at any time — of course this would collapse instantly if it could even be said there was any collapsible structure there to begin with. At the other extreme would be some sort of totalitarian rule by a supervillain who has a robot army so he doesn't have to worry about mutiny by his henchmen. A lot of political philosophy could be framed as seeking to answer the question of how many and what sort of compromises ought to be made away from the first extreme in order to achieve a system that's at once stable and morally acceptable.
Didn't realize I had a doppleganger in this community :)
I just noticed the same thing a few minutes ago. We probably should both set avatars so it's easier for people to tell us apart when skimming the comments. I can also include my middle name in my display name.
(now done)
>“vetocracies,” in which too many actors have veto rights over what gets built
This affected Poland so badly in the 18th century that there wasn't a country called Poland in the 19th century.
This reminds of your archipelago analogy on SSC.
Hey, pontifex, glad to see you back. you should join us at DSL, the forum we set up to preserve the SSC open thread community and use better technology for easier discussions.
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/board,1.0.html
I think it's important, that this is not only a US-centric issue but affects other countries like Germany as well (one country with very low polarization according to the other Klein post). There have been several big projects in the past that were significantly delayed (5-10 years) and cost much more (3-8x) than planned: Elbphilharmonie (a concert hall), Stuttgart 21 (a train station) and the BER airport. Each project had its own issues, but AFAICT the problems were a mix of incompetence in the government and (overly?) high building standards. For example the airport was delayed ~8 years in part because the fire safety wasn't deemed good enough, the concert hall became over 100m more expensive over a row on statics alone and the train station faced pressure over some rare insect that was harmed by the build. I can't comment on the validity of these concerns. Civic pressure either didn't happen or didn't succeed (e.g. a complaint about the new flight routes was dismissed in court). So at least over here the problem is less about vetocracy and more about politicians that don't understand how to write good contracts and (over-?)regulation.
But the simple word "over-regulation" misses a distinction. In software engineering there is a process called refactoring: It means "to remove complexity (largely without changing behavior) by identifying common cases and generalizing the process to them". In science, the analogue would be a paper that connects the dots between slightly different approaches in a field and suggests a common methodology. As a rule of thumb, if you don't refactor software it gets so big that no one can work with it anymore (a phenomenon called 'technical debt'). I believe that Germany's (and probably the States's) regulatory environment is not as much over-regulated as it is under-refactored. The problem is not necessary that all of the regulations are slightly useful but too cumbersome as a whole, but rather that we don't have good systems in place for dealing with the extra complexity introduced by them and need an ever increasing amount of lawyers for dealing with it.
> I believe that Germany's (and probably the States's) regulatory environment is not as much over-regulated as it is under-refactored.
This is an extremely good idea.
In the same vein, a constitution should provide the means to lawfully change it (reasonably stabilized against the fad du jour) to reflect the changing values of societies. Otherwise it will require ever more arcane exegesis (of the will of the original prophet/revolutionary/founding fathers/…) and ever more convoluted amendments to avoid being seen as irrelevant.
In the US, at the federal level, refactoring the regulations requires an act of Congress... which can be done in the *House* but not in the malapportioned, filibuster-loving, utterly-broken Senate.
I really think nearly every problem with the US could be solved by abolishing the Senate.
States are much better at refactoring their regulations *because they don't have malapportioned Senates*, thanks to the Baker v. Carr ruling and subsequent ones which forced them to stop malapportioning their State Senates.
> The crypto solution, which has yet to fully mature, is something like “create structures which it’s impossible for anyone, including the creator, to change”. Seems like a pretty drastic solution. But what would a better one look like?
I see a call for me to comment again with my perennial favorite, ophelimist democracy:(https://adelaybeingreborn.wordpress.com/ophelimo/) . Noteworthy features that are relevant to vetocracy:
* It's democratic but non-majoritarian in the sense that it has no arbitrary thresholds, whether 50%+1, 2/3rds, unanimity, or other.
* It delivers power not to factions (who must then compromise) but essentially to manifestos, so that we would actually get to test out an ideologically-consistent set of proposals and evaluate how well they work.
* In place of veto points, it uses several mechanisms (including a fake prediction market) so that "everyone’s preferences are taken into account to the degree that they are humane, and that everyone’s humane preferences are realized to an equal extent".
Two important, interlocking pieces:
1. Diffuse benefits, concentrated costs
2. Decreased coordination costs for medium-sized groups to advocate against concentrated costs
There are a lot of policies that are net good for society but inflict a cost on some set of stakeholders. For example, right now the US government subsidizes for expensive houses via the mortgage interest tax deduction. This is a diffuse cost (everyone pays a little more in taxes/bears a little more government debt) with a concentrated benefit (rich homeowners get more money). Homeowners are tuned-in enough to politics to pay close attention to anyone who makes any noise about reducing this subsidy, and can easily coordinate to punish politicians who do so. But we don't really have a way for everyone else to coordinate to remove this policy, largely because the benefits are so small per person as not to be worth it.
The costs of coordination is roughly inversely proportional to "how tuned in voters are" or "how intensely scrutinized policy changes are in widely consumed media". Media is cheap, every change is subject to a ton of scrutiny.
That's enough to get a lot of vetocracy right there - scrutiny + interest groups can coordinate and punish + broader society can't coordinate on diffuse benefits looks a lot like vetocracy in practice.
> I'm not sure how Klein thinks of this. Maybe he would say that vetocracy is getting worse everywhere, but that partisan polarization turns potential veto points into actual veto points. That is, the filibuster has always been a potential problem. But Congress was able to get by with it for decades, because everyone was polite and cooperative and didn't want to screw things up too badly
Ezra wrote an entire book on this which Scott claims to have read. The answer is in there. I can't tell if he's not engaging in good faith on this stuff or he just isn't engaged enough in politics to understand the nuances. This is pretty embarrassing though
>Ezra wrote an entire book on this which Scott claims to have read. The answer is in there
Feel free to enlighten us.
Sure. The filibuster specifically is an accident of history that was historically not used very much, but this isn't too important.
The country polarizing along party lines since the 60s is indeed the reason potential veto points are actual veto points. But it's really important to understand that's not because previously "everyone was polite and cooperative", it's because the parties were not ideologically coherent. Thus major legislation was cross-coalitional. See the vote totals here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964#Passage_in_the_Senate In 2021 this would just be along party lines, and thus vetocracy. But that was not a great state of affairs either for a bunch of reasons I can get into if you care.
But yeah this is like the crux of Ezra's book, so for Scott to say the "polite and cooperative" line, it tells me he just didn't read it. Which he basically admitted in the review where he claimed not to understand a bunch of key arguments. I think he skimmed this one.
Ezra Klein assumes, based on no analysis whatever, that there exists a multitude of positive return projects just laying around in plain sight, and that the failure to execute on them can be nothing other than a huge institutional failure, both public and private.
In 30+ years performing independent economic analyses on proposed private-sector capital expenditures (ranging from $75 million to $40 billion) I have seen very few good projects and hundreds of bad ones. I do not believe my experience constitutes a set of outliers, nor should this be surprising to anyone who gives it much thought. Making money is hard and competition drives out easy gains. But projects take on a life of their own, as the people who have invested significant time in their planning and justification develop an almost religious faith in them. Large, capital intensive companies will normally vet many, many times more projects than they ever approve, for good reason. And the ones they do fund will almost inevitably underperform projections, even if they wind up being profitable, which they often will not.
So, the problem of profitable private investment is extremely hard, but the problem of investment by government is harder yet. One of the reasons for this is that government decisions are not ultimately constrained by the discipline of the capital markets. Unlike companies that must convince debt and equity investors to put their money into the considered projects and to bear the risks of failure, the government uses its monopoly on the use of violence to simple take money from taxpayers and to force them to bear the risks. This is what allows failures like Solyndra, which was unable to raise money in capital markets where funding is voluntary, but whose government came through with guarantees from the taxpayers who were given no choice. For colorful detail on how and why large investments and in particular, government investments so often go wrong, see “Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition” by Bent Flyvbjerg, et al.
But the government’s dilemma is worse even that that. Unlike a corporation for whom the only (proper) objective is to maximize shareholder wealth, the government is in the position of having to balance the interests of a theoretically limitless set of stakeholders whose desires are usually in conflict. There simply is no quantitative solution to this problem – one cannot even imagine constructing an objective function subject to constraints and then solving that problem to get the proper investment decision. This is necessarily a political problem, which is unsatisfactory, but efforts to get the politics out of them leaves no decision criteria other than caprice. Nice for the untethered decision maker, but bad for the public at large.
As an economist I recognize and accept the idea that the market will tend toward underinvestment in public goods. This does not, however, imply that any and every investment in public goods is warranted or that either democracy or technocracy will somehow (magic?) be able to solve the unsolvable problem of the ‘proper’ allocation of resources to public goods. This is the proper sphere for government, which should proceed cautiously, transparently and with humility.
Government investment in non-public goods, on the other hand, applies institutional incompetence to problems for which its involvement has no moral justification. And there is almost no problem so bad that the active attention of the government cannot make worse.
Very insightful comment. Building things worth building is indeed an incredibly hard problem that doesn't seem to be appreciated by Klein.
Having said, there really seem to be a few positive sum projects that are held back by institutional failures. The clearest example - if San Fransisco were to modestly update its zoning laws, a dozen highly profitable apartment complexes would be built within five years.
I can't speak for Ezra, but I question if he shares your assumption that the only government projects worth doing are the ones that are "positive return".
You are loading onto that phrase more than it is intended to support. A positive return project is one whose benefits exceed the costs. Or are you suggesting the Mr. Klein is advocating for projects whose costs are expected to exceed their benefits?
In the financial sense of "costs" and "benefits", yes, I do doubt that Ezra Klein is restricting his advocacy in this manner.
Indeed, there is no quantitative solution to the question of which projects are "best". But this problem is not restricted to the public sector. I do not share your belief that the only "proper" objective of a private (or public) corporation is to maximize wealth.
I can list off billions of dollars of obviously positive-social-return projects without batting an eye. The most bloody obvious is Medicare for All. A national high speed rail network is equally obvious. Now, I know the detailed reasons why these haven't happened, but it is inarguable that their benefits would vastly exceed their costs. Next question?
It is "bloody obvious" to me that a national high speed rail network would be a colossal boondoggle. It is exactly the type of project that Bent Flyvbjerg wrote about. The standard story for such projects is that they drastically underestimate costs and overestimate use. I'll note that California's high speed rail project was originally planned to be fully operational by now at about a third of the currently projected cost of completion and is now expected to run at significantly slower speeds than first claimed. It is hard to see how it is going to compete with air travel between SF and LA if it ever gets built. As for Medicare for All, I suppose it could be, but it is very far from obvious. For example, the Oregon Medicaid Health Experiment failed to show statistically significant health benefits from enrollment. Given that the impact such a program would have on the existing healthcare financing and provision systems is uncertain (e.g. would it impact the typically much more comprehensive private health insurance offerings, perhaps even ending that market completely?) makes its cost/benefit relationship tricky to estimate and far from obvious. Finally, you are faced with the problem of politically determined investment. Currently a majority of the country would, I think, oppose both programs. So their net benefits are, almost by definition, not obvious. So how do you convince voters that they are wrong if you will not deign to perform actual analysis? I hope not by insisting that anyone who doesn't see the same obvious payoff that you do is immoral?
No, not immoral. Just stupid or brainwashed or ignorant! For you, since you're stupid or brainwashed or ignorant:
(1) China has built high speed rail at reasonable cost. Europe has. Japan has. Taiwan has. FFS, Morocco has.
If the US can't do it, it just means the US is broken. The need for HSR is obvious. Cars don't scale up to high travel volumes and airplanes create too much pollution to use for short hauls.
(2) Single-payer would cut out the completely wasted expenditure on paperwork. This is actually, I am not kidding, 50% of the "medical" costs in the US. HALF. Armies of paper-pushers at doctors offices fighting with armies of paper-pushers at hospitals. They DO NOT EXIST in countries with single-payer systems. With the savings from firing them, we could provide universal coverage for everyone AND pay all the fired paper-pushers enhanced unemployment compensation for two years. THIS HAS ACTUALLY BEEN STUDIED.
Oh, definitely some signs of "brainwashed", BTW. Everyone who has done their homework knows that the CAHSR project cost numbers were artificially inflated by changing the inflation estimate methodology; it's coming in at about 1.5 times the original cost estimates if you don't sneakily change what year's dollars you're using (which a sabotage bill set up by Republicans forced them to do).
You make strong argument. Particularly the part where you tell me I'm either stupid, brainwashed or ignorant. It's hard to refute that type of incisive analysis.
Having read Ezra Klein since he was a teenager I'm pretty confident about his definition of "vetocracy:" It's basically a system in which a very small minority (such as an individual President) can block consensus or otherwise invalidate the will of even a very large majority.
With this understanding there's nothing wrong with frameworks that permit vetos. Unadulterated lower-case d democracy really would be pretty brutal without it, vetos are actually a good thing. It's not that the wisdom of crowds isn't a thing -- it's that, as Lincoln dryly quipped, the wisdom of crowds is neither continuous nor is it instantaneous.
The key phrase though is "frameworks that permit vetos." Just as a system that makes it easy for everyone overrule anybody ("pure" democracy) would be highly problematic, a system that let anyone overrule everybody (a "vetocracy") has similarly obvious problems.
The question is how to find a balance so that Mennonite and Catholic students aren't forced to recite Protestant prayers in public schools on the one hand, while not letting Bay Area NIMBYs exploit environmental review of an existing parking lot block development of low-income housing.
One of the keys to "why does this keep happening" is probably related to Pareto efficiency: "Pareto efficiency is when an economy has its resources and goods allocated to the maximum level of efficiency, and no change can be made without making someone worse off." -- Wikipedia. When the system allows anyone who's made worse off to block changes that would make everyone else off (arguably including the "offended party" as in the case of wearing masks during a pandemic, for instance) the obstacles they're able to raise (file a suit, get an injunction, place a Senate hold, threaten a filibuster) can make it easier to just not bother.
The end result (to borrow another line from Pareto) is that instead of obtaining 80% of a desire result with 20% effort/cost/time we end up in a situation 80% of effort, cost, and time must be expended to get even 20% of the desired result.
In the end a lot of stuff ends up not happening because it's just too much effort to overcome even small amounts of resistance. I'm not sure you could call that authentic "vetocracy" but it's a good enough shorthand.
I'm a fan of David Deutsch's explanation for democracy as error correction: democracy works not because "the will of the people" is correct, but because democratic institutions are good at removing ineffective leaders and policies (ie correct errors). This is because it's impossible to always prevent errors since the future is unknowable, so the best we can do is try things and then correct the errors. The corollary of this is that democracy depends on (1) experimentation and (2) voters being able to accurately blame a leader or party for an error. Vetocracy makes (1) worse by making it harder to pass experimental policies, and hinders (2) because policies are shaped in part by vetoers separate from the electoral process.
This is something that's scary about our democracy: we know it works, but we don't know quite why it works, so we don't know which parts are indispensable and which are vestigial. Vetocracy is dangerous because it damages our democracy without necessarily attacking any of its visible infrastructure (eg elections, civil rights, etc.)
> but because democratic institutions are good at removing ineffective leaders and policies (ie correct errors)
Leaders, yes, but not policies. Policy in democracies tend towards immortality, almost regardless of how dysfunctional they are.
I agree 100% with this analysis -- 100%. The US Senate is particularly infamous for concealing blame, with the filibuster used to vote "for" bills while making them fail, thus being against a bill while pretending to be for it.
> The crypto solution, which has yet to fully mature, is something like “create structures which it’s impossible for anyone, including the creator, to change”.
Talk of the big things crypto can do makes me a bit suspicious; there's just so much short/medium-term financial interest in favor of hyping crypto that feels like it could be distorting downstream discourse. Like, it feels like we've been in roughly the same place of "the truly important uses of crypto are yet to be realized" for a while now?
It could easily be that I just don't get it or that it might be yet to come, though.
But concretely, how does crypto help us defeat our archenemy the FDA?
Is it that an alternative FDA will be built on crypto infrastructure -- like you design a formal structure on top of crypto infrastructure which interfaces with humans and human organizations in such a way that it is incentivized to produce stamps of some form on different drugs that are just really good & discriminatory information on drugs? So good that it will organically just kind of take over as the premier authoritative institution on drugs?
Where the crypto's advantage over regular FDA is the possibility is that there are none of these vetocracy-type strings to pull on to make the CryptoFDA super conservative?
Or is it something like cryptocurrencies will allow us to conduct economic activity without fiat currency, and this will make it easy for us to live generally outside the influence of the government. Like money is the material of the chains government places on us, and by switching to crypto we dissolve the chains and then we are free (this is a vague story, reflecting my own lack of understanding).
In an emergency like the current pandemic, people are willing to overlook side effects in order to get the new drug/vaccines/whatsit out fast. So what if it makes all your hair fall out, would you prefer to die?
In ordinary times, if you rush through (say) a migraine medication but a side-effect is that a thousand people find all their hair falls out, they will go to court over this.
"Why is this happening here and now" is generally a great question to ask about broad trends, but it seems almost unnecessary here. It seems like institutions have been adding more veto points over time, so... when you keep doing that, eventually you have too many of them?
Agree! What if the process is "as time passes, veto points increase?"
We might falsify this by identifying instances when the number of veto points decreased. When I think of "permissionless innovation" I think of new frontiers being opened up, not existing veto points relaxing.
"if the government can't do anything, why aren't we a libertarian paradise?"
Because they won't let us do anything either. Next time you go to a convenience store, look for their "permit board" which lists all the permits they need to stay in business. Contrast that with Guatemala where many people run a tiny bodega out of their front room.
"Don't we eventually reach the point where the government can't implement more regulations on itself, and then disappears in a puff of logic?"
We WILL reach the point where nobody will loan any actual money to the USG, and printing up new money just creates inflation. Then you get Mises' crack-up collapse. We kinda don't have to worry about the extent of the US government because it's going to cease to have the resources to do anything, and soon. Read Neal Stephanson's Snowcrash.
"If this is true, is there anything to do about it?"
Yes. States need to put their foot down and say to the federal government "The Constitution does not give you the power to do this. But still, we're going to get you do it for interstate commerce. But if you try to do it for intrastate commerce, we will stop you." So people will be able to just start businesses and sell things and not need any kind of permit. Oh, I mean, people in free states like New Hampshire, Montana, Florida, or Nevada. Not people in New York or New Jersey.
When is "soon" exactly?
Mmmmm, probably when the price of oil starts to be denominated in Rubles or Renminbi.
I meant: on roughly what time scale are you thinking this will happen, 5 years, 10, 20, 35, 50?
Five years would not surprise me, but I've anticipated this for most of my adult life, so who knows at this point? There is a lot of ruin in a nation.
'Five years would not surprise me, but I've anticipated this for most of my adult life'
During your adult life, has the amount of years away you think this is been gradually decreasing or has it stayed roughly constant? Like, 10 years ago, did you think it was 5 years away, like you think now, or did you think it was 10 years away? How long away did you think it was 20 years ago?
A big part of the problem of overall government is that new legislation is bolted on top of previous legislation, then you end up with five different schemes to do basically the same thing operating at once, contradictory regulations, and nobody wanting to make the first move to scrap the whole thing and start over because of the threat of law cases by some ambulance-chaser opportunist lawyer or special interest group going to court over "by repealing this legislation our members will suffer terrible hardship", never mind that it's difficult to dismantle the towering, creaky, swaying house of cards without causing more damage than you are trying to remedy.
That was not really a single sentence, was it? But yes, legislation is hard to read and harder to understand precisely because it consists of changes to existing law.
Go Russ! Love any post that synthesizes Snowcrash into political discourse. You also have my sympathies for your small biz / states rights libertarian vision. Even if the scale-or-die DNA of American business culture effectively guaranties that any assertion of states rights to counter the endless creep of the commerce clause will fail (because big biz wants uniform market standards).
See, for an example of vetocrazy, the fine print here: https://www.irishvernacular.com/
How much of the increase in veto points etc. is just a matter of growth? More people, crowded into ever growing cities, and especially crowding into successful metro areas like SF? Seems to me that growth in and of itself creates exactly this dynamic.
1. I feel like this intersects with previous discussions of "cost disease".
2. there's something more fundamental here, and I see it in the comments.
I see it everywhere. I think it has something to do with the internet. Not just the obvious things people have talked about regarding polarization and such.. but..
Pretty much no matter what it is, discussions on facebook tend to go in a godwinny, my side your side your side direction, even if its something stupid and in theory apolitical like fandoms opinions about stuff within their fandoms.
Social media plays on certain incentive structures. But also... the more percentage of time spend on social media, the more their lived experience reflects the dynamics of those interactions.
Let me make a personal contrast- there are some social groups where very passive aggressive commentary and social dynamics based on this is the norm. In those communtiies, the ideas that anyway would resort to violence over this is fundamentally absurd, this would result in violation of an extreme social taboo where the person who responded in such a way was universally condemned.
On the other hand, in certain urban punk scenes, where people live in collective houses, squat, etc, conversations tend to be more respectful. On some level because of a shared sense of community, but on another level because doing that passive aggressive shit would get you punched in the face.
My point?
Before social media, people's lived experience included more "real life" friends (as measured by many statictics) and some need for more "social trust", at least within their circles of friends and community. This lived experience is quite difference from what many people know experience where friends are fewer but "allies" are both cheap, affordable, and disposable.
The time spent living in this "real world" dynamiuc versus time spent in a social media online dyanamic probably has something to do with it- as people have less practical experience of the "social trust" deal.
"Since regulating corporations and private individuals is an attempt to protect the vulnerable from too-hastily-applied power"
My impression as a Southern Californian is that vetocracy as we know it emerged around 1969 with the environmental movement in places like Santa Barbara, Beverly Hills and Malibu. The unstated but underlying goal was to protect the best-off from the well-off, for example, by making Beverly Hills housing too expensive for, say, San Fernando Valley orthodontists to move in en masse.
The population counts of these superb places have barely changed over the decades. For example, here is Beverly Hills' population trends:
Census Pop. %±
1920 674 —
1930 17,429 2,485.9%
1940 26,823 53.9%
1950 29,032 8.2%
1960 30,817 6.1%
1970 33,416 8.4%
1980 32,646 −2.3%
1990 31,971 −2.1%
2000 33,784 5.7%
2010 34,109 1.0%
2019 (est.) 33,792 [8] −0.9%
"Recently [Ezra] followed it up with an editorial in the New York Times arguing that California, for all its supposed liberalism, was structurally conservative - it's good at cosmetic nods to progressive aesthetics, but incapable of progress toward real progressive goals. Its vetocracy is too entrenched to let anyone change anything."
Feature, not bug. Basically, everybody in California thinks California was best when they first got there. (That's sort of true, although a few things, most notably air quality, have improved dramatically.) And everybody in California worries that the rest of the world will someday wise up and want to move to California.
So, an enormous amount of effort has gone into vetoing new construction to keep the masses out.
Similarly, Robert Moses' downfall began when he tried to build a freeway through Greenwich Village, which people with cultured taste had long prized as a far-above average urban neighborhood.
This focus on political inaction is misguided. Most of our “inability to build” arises not from the inability to pass new legislation but from the accretion of cruft over time in all “legible” (in the James Scott sense) constructs, whether it be code, regulations or just procedures/processes themselves. This sclerosis is not unique to the United States and it is not even unique to governments. It is the eventual fate of all large, old bureaucratic organisations - private or public. Bureaucracy + time = Vetocracy.
Most of this buildup occurs due to the natural need to deal with more and more scenarios and prevent gaming/abuse of the process (e.g. contractors gaming a bidding process). What starts out as a simple, legible process eventually transforms into a complex, illegible mess. Anything legible follows this pattern unless explicitly fought against - refactoring is an example of a practise that expressly tries to fight this decay. In larger, older organisations it is not realistic to expect much refactoring. No one ever gets promoted for doing “maintenance” work like refactoring.
This phenomenon isn’t even unique to capitalism. The Soviet Union was a great example of this evolution - by the 70s it was completely unable to evolve. As Robert Service pointed out, “the number of ‘normative acts’ of legislation in force across the USSR had risen to 600,000” by then. All that was possible was Brezhnevian “stability” and any attempt at true reform was more likely to trigger collapse (as Gorbachev found out).
You can’t solve this problem by making things more legible. Therefore crypto or “smart contracts” do nothing to solve this problem and may make it worse. Having an increasingly complex, arcane process enforced by crypto may make it worse as it becomes literally impossible to avoid the constraints enforced by the machine (as I describe here https://macroresilience.substack.com/p/an-explanation-for-our-current-institutional).
Strong points, well phrased and cited. Cheers!
There are a _few_ refactoring experts (in software at least) that probably get paid very well for doing that kind of maintenance, at least some times!
But I've personally had a good amount of success 'selling' minimally incremental pieces of large refactoring goals – refactoring on installment in a sense. I'm pretty sympathetic to the general confusion and skepticism of outsiders ('management') about the need to regularly refactor anything and everything – to them it really does seem frivolous. I think that's mostly due to unfamiliarity – it's very clear how helpful refactoring would be when you're inside the 'plumbing' of some 'spaghetti'. I'd imagine people can spot the benefits of cleaning up a bunch of physical cables or wires! I think myopia plays a part too, as even software people often only pay lip service to the need to refactor.
One explanation worth considering is the US simply is bigger, has more interest groups and will thus gravitate towards creating more veto-points. What makes doing things simpler in smaller countries with less interest groups might not be something that can be scaled up. Other big countries like China or India don´t put as much consideration on groups interests as US does.
I think much of the problem derives from the American system of paying lawyers even if you win. (In many countries the typical case is that if the judge agrees you were in the right all along, your opponent pays much or all of your lawyer's fees.)
This system makes it expensive to sue the government, so the right to sue is insufficient as a check on the government's power. Hence veto powers, which provide an additional check. The systematic long-term costs that this incurs is a lot less obvious than the benefit of being able to defend your rights without losing lots of money.
Scott, I think you’re conflating laws with regulations. Ezra Klein’s arguments about vetocracy talks about laws passed by congress. Regulation keeps getting larger because there are many fewer veto points- generally speaking, regulatory agencies don’t need congress to approve new or expanded regulations.
Another point is that Ezra Klein seems to be wrong because the framers specifically wanted a bias for inaction. Maybe our bias for inaction became stronger, or maybe like with your argument about scientific research, we already got most of the low-hanging fruit so now it gets harder.
Dovetail is Elon musk on Rogan speaking about why we need the FAA, but that pure disaster avoidance leaves out half the equation: the lives lost because of the innovations not made.
"Recently he followed it up with an editorial in the New York Times arguing that California, for all its supposed liberalism, was structurally conservative - it's good at cosmetic nods to progressive aesthetics, but incapable of progress toward real progressive goals. Its vetocracy is too entrenched to let anyone change anything.
Nobody who’s ever looked into the housing crisis in San Francisco will disagree here, but it raises some complicated questions that need some sorting out."
If I go by the recent scandal, the problem with San Francisco is that local government is stupendously corrupt and everyone plus their hangers-on, acolytes, toadies, minions, and friends and family of all the above are making shedloads of money out of the convolutions of the system, therefore they have absolutely no incentive to reform any of it (especially since they might have to go to jail or even worse, disgorge the money they skimmed).
One reason for a "vetocracy" is Frank Herbert's The Bureau of Sabotage. Before he created Dune, he was writing space-age official saboteurs in the 50s-70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Sabotage
"In Herbert's fiction, sometime in the far future, government becomes terrifyingly efficient. Red tape no longer exists: laws are conceived of, passed, funded, and executed within hours, rather than months. The bureaucratic machinery becomes a juggernaut, rolling over human concerns and welfare with terrible speed, jerking the universe of sentients one way, then another, threatening to destroy everything in a fit of spastic reactions. In short, the speed of government goes beyond sentient control (in this fictional universe, many alien species co-exist, with a common definition of sentience marking their status as equals).
Founded by the mysterious "Five Ears" of unknown species, BuSab began as a terrorist organization whose sole purpose was to frustrate the workings of government in order to give sentients a chance to reflect upon changes and deal with them. Having saved sentiency from its government, BuSab was officially recognized as a necessary check on the power of government. It provides a natural (and lucrative) outlet for society's regular crop of troublemakers, who must be countered by society's regular crop of "do-gooders".
First a corps, then a bureau, BuSab gained legally recognized powers to interfere in the workings of any world, of any species, of any government or corporation, answerable only to themselves. Their motto is, "In Lieu of Red Tape."
Forbidden from committing acts of sabotage against private citizens, BuSab acts as a monitor of, and a conscience for, the collective sentiency, watching for signs of anti-sentient behaviour by corporate or government entities and preserving the dignity of individuals. Some essential functions of government are immune from BuSab by statute. BuSab is opposed by such organizations as the "Tax Watchers" who have successfully lobbied to grant themselves the same immunity from BuSab enjoyed by agencies such as public utilities.
BuSab monitors even itself and employs sabotage to prevent the agency from slipping into hidebound stasis. Agents are promoted to the head of the organization by successfully sabotaging the Secretary. By the same token, there is no term limit imposed on the Secretary of the Bureau of Sabotage. As long as he is alert enough to avoid being sabotaged, he remains qualified to lead BuSab."
I think the broader historical answer to “ People have wanted fewer bad things forever, so any explanation of increasing vetocracy should start with an explanation of why this is becoming a problem now. ”
Is probably “Your [company / regime / nation / dynasty / civilization] grows ossified, collapsed, and is supplanted by a née one with fewer veto points”
I guess the localist solution would be 'minimize vetoes by only allowing directly effected people a veto'.
An organization with 10 wild vetoes on the loose is a lot easier to run than one with 1000. You can get the 10 vetoes in a room and hash out an agreement in an afternoon, while with 1000 it looks more like the UN general assembly where a trade agreement stretches to thousands of pages and takes years.
The corollary would be, 'don't let any one issue effect too many people'. Big multinational corporations having a major financial incentive to veto local laws (eg https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/business/north-dakota-app-store-bill.html) is one of the best arguments I know for not having big multinational corporations, or at least barring them from your jurisdiction if you can.
Of course, this brings you closer to the 'fall for every trap Moloch can devise' end of the spectrum. And that is solved by decreasing the number of jurisdictions (ideally to one) and you can only do both by having less absolute number of humans. So maybe Malthus was right & we're just running out of coordination power before we run out of food.
"Vetocracy" seems like a species of the genus "anticommons"--sometimes applied in the context of property law, but applicable in other contexts. Described by Michael Heller in a Harvard Law Review in the 1990s, summarized here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
A specific example of vetocracy in action: the failure to renovate and improve Penn Station in New York City. The project has been held up by various forms of bickering for over 30 years because nobody actually has the power to be Robert Moses and say "fuck you, we're doing this whether you want us to or not".
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/11/29/penn-station-robert-caro-073564
If anyone else is wondering, "E/I balance" seems to be excitation/inhibition, usually used in neurology.
Thanks.
The flaw with the increased regulation thesis is that the article does not present strong evidence that regulations are actually increasing beyond "everybody knows they do".
I know, it is the most persistent talking point among businesses, but the Ease of Doing Business around the world index has been published since 2004, and does not show a strong trend towards increased regulation in the US. For example, the number of procedures needed to build a warehouse fell from 19 in 2006 to 15.8 in 2017 (although the time needed to do so rose from 70 to 80 days). For other indicators, there is no strong change either. As an aside: it is often a libertarian assertion that governments almost never revoke regulations, and they just keep increasing. Internationally, this is, at least accoding to the index, wrong, as there is a very strong trend towards less regulation (although more so in developing countries than developed nations where the trend exists but is weaker).
2017 numbers, page 248: https://www.doingbusiness.org/en/reports/global-reports/doing-business-2017
2006 numbers, page 158: https://www.doingbusiness.org/en/reports/global-reports/doing-business-2006
International trend: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2019/10/24/doing-business-2020-sustaining-the-pace-of-reforms (figure at the bottom)
Since Scott is a Psychiatrist, I thought he might relate Vetocracy to the psychology of saying "No". Saying "No" is multi-dimensional, but ultimately it is about power whether in personal relationships or institutional settings. Anyone who has worked in a large organization where multi-levels of approval are needed has experienced the executives who no matter what will always say no the first time a request arrives.
As an example, in getting papers approved for publication, a common practice is to put in something for an approver to delete because then when deleted they will approve......
Is vetocracy measurable on a country-by-country or state-by-state level? If not, it would seem that this question is unquantifiable.
How about, "Describe an existing structure which is impossible for anyone to change, and then describe how to operate effectively within it?"
God I'd love scott's thoughts on Henry George (either "Progress and Poverty" or "Social Problems").
Whatever happens to constructive criticism among all these vetos? It should be possible to apply some controls to bucket vetos by intent and sentiment, correct?
The story about polarization/vetocracy that I've heard Ezra express on his podcast is pretty close to Scott's guess. Basically: The US government has a lot of veto points, but used to get things done in spite of these, because we had lower polarization between the parties. This usually comes up when people ask him what we should do about polarization - which usually boils down to "polarization is likely here to stay, and may even be desirable, but in order for it not to break us we need less veto points."
I have 1 major problem with this piece: Why the automatic assumption that these veto points are bad things?
There's veto points to protect worker conditions, to protect the environment, to protect endangered species, to stop corruption... All of those are good things!
Back in the 17th century, the most profitable enterprise in the world was sending ships to the East Indies (side note: People often think this means India, but actually this means the lands east of India. So South-East Asia and Indonesia). This was absurdly profitable, with returns in the many hundreds of percents. These ships also regularly came back with a third of their crew dead or missing, if they came back at all.
If we had had stricter labor laws back then, the Dutch and British golden ages would have been far less rich. But that's not a bad thing! Not for those hundreds of thousands of sailors who would have survived, not to mention the native populations.
Looking at the world today, I'm sure there are some bad veto points. Obviously there will be inefficiencies in any complex system. But I see no evidence that these veto points are a bad things on average. I don't even see an attempt to make the argument. Just the automatic assumption that regulation must be bad.
So... what? If we want to build a road we should just bulldoze over everything in the way? People? Nature? Endangered Species? Ancient Burial Grounds? And if a third of the workers die during construction, we should look the other way? Because that's the logical consequence of saying there should not be any veto points.
Scott writes: "People have wanted fewer bad things forever, so any explanation of increasing vetocracy should start with an explanation of why this is becoming a problem (sic!) now."
But this is obvious! We're living at the first time in history where people have the power to enforce fewer bad things. Those 17th century sailors didn't want to die either! They just had no way to enforce safer labor conditions.
Western Europe has a lot more veto points than the USA. Stricter environmental laws, stricter labor laws, stricter privacy laws, higher food and safety standards, the list goes on. As a result, the US GDP is slightly higher, but average living standards in Western Europe are much higher, as well as indices for well-being and happiness.
So give me those veto points!
Ah, but Western Europe has a lot fewer veto points than the US in the most critical area.
Specifically: if the lower house of Parliament passes a law, in *practically every country in Europe*, there is nobody who can actually veto it. The upper houses mainly have delay power (as in the British House of Lords); the EU and Council of Europe have the power to disapprove or to threaten retaliation in many cases; but in almost every case, the popularly elected lower house is supreme and can steamroller them if they want.
The equivalent in the US would be if the House could simply override the Senate and the President provided it spent enough time doing so.
That's the way it is in all of Western Europe.
Just because there is 1 veto point in the US that does not exist in Western Europe does not mean that the US has more veto points overall. A veto point in the context of what Scott was writing is not a literal veto, it's points at which groups can delay or stop decision making processes. The EU generally has stricter environmental laws, labor laws, privacy laws, etc, meaning decisions to, for example, build a road, can be challenged for many more reasons.
Anyway, my argument is that veto points are good things (or at least that Scott has completely failed to make the argument that they could be bad). Precisely which territory has more veto points is secondary at best.
If you look at the history of the US, the malapportioned-Senate veto point has been causing this sort of problem since *day one* and actually caused the Civil War. The way around it was adding new states, until they ran out of land to carve into new states. So this isn't actually new. What's odd is that the US has managed to not collapse earlier (except when it did, in the case of the Civil War).
The history of other countries is one of the removal of veto points.
The moses problem seems easy enough to fix (in principle; the politics are hard now that we are here): have lots of veto points for government coercion, but not for private initiative. If Moses wants to build his road through poor ppl's houses he has to have a million listening sessions. If a private developer wants to build something it can just buy the houses, and buy any renters out of their contracts, at prices the people being displaced are willing to accept. Better yet, make Moses do the same, instead of having listening sessions. People who are actually harmed by the project get the compensation they need to make it fair; everyone else can stfu.
the only purpose of an authoritarian socialist government that i can see would be its ability to achieve/build large projects rather rapidly and efficiently. But such a government would need a visionary at the helm, vs. the despots the role tends to attract - and no - trudeau is no such visionary.
The main problem, I believe, comes from a deep misdiagnosing the problem. The problem is not over-regulation. The problem is outdated regulation. Since the rise of neoliberal mantra of "government should govern the less" in the 70s more and more roadblocks for new regulation were raised.
In effect this means many public policy fields are stuck in 50s and 60s regulatory frameworks, deeply outdated in regards to both technological and societal advancements. A thing many libertarians will never aknowledge is that a good regulation is actually necessary for a free market to remain free. An up-to-date, quality regulation has a great potential to advance competition and innovation. But the US has relinquished all capacity to create and enforce such regulations. The result are 21st century tech giants regulated by laws that were built for paper news stands and telegraphs. Cities dealing with 21st century problems using 50s euclidian zoning practices. 21st century internet content creators, publishers and platforms governed by a copyright law written in 1976.