I've never heard of Oriana, but since you clearly have why don't you summarise it a bit here, explain its relevance and your cryptic comment about it being Kryptonite?
Well, basically, it's a little village which is for white Boers only.
It was founded shortly after the end of Apartheid and was built entirely with white Boer labor, as well. This is actually allowed under the SA constitution (freedom of association) but obviously they're a reliable bugbear for left-wing and intellectual circles in South Africa, though from what I've seen they usually focus on the concept being fundamentally wrong instead of any particular conduct: they're not a sun-down town and I don't believe there's ever been an anti-black hate crime there. What's funny is that from what I can tell if it weren't for the ethnic separatism angle they'd be a bit of a center-left darling: they don't have a proper police force, just a small security team, and they have a direct democratic council-style government.
For the record I don't quite know what to think of Telosa either, and a bunch of my Georgist friends are kind of confused about it. If I had $25-400 billion to throw around for the movement I could think of a lot more practical bang-for-buck ways to live out the philosophy's goals (and generate real-world empirical tests of whether it lives up to its claims) than building a super city in the desert.
To their credit, one of the guys working on the project showed up in one of the Seminars I was attending with Ted Gwartney (a noted Georgist assessor[1]), and I have his email address if you want to put any pointed questions to them.
It's perfect. If the city succeeds, he can say Georgism must be true because a Georgist city succeeded. If he fails, he can say Georgism must be true because he as a landowner was unable to create value for the land.
Yeah, you'd imagine he'd start off with a pre-existing community, say a small town or even small city that is now in decline because circumstances have changed and now all the young folk want to live in New York and the factory closed down because it's cheaper to buy Chinese widgets than manufacture them domestically. He'd have a structure already in place and he could try if this scheme would work to re-invigorate the place.
Starting off on a clean slate in the desert sounds great, but you have to entice people to live there, and part of why people say they like or want to live in NY or LA or SF is "the access to great museums, art galleries, theaters, opera and music, restaurants, vibrant night life, vibrant creative world, energy and enthusiasm, chance to make it big, all the big name companies are there".
What do you have in your new empty city in the desert comparable to "this one restaurant that is being written up with rave reviews by all the critics in the NYT etc. so everybody wants to go there"?
>> Yeah, you'd imagine he'd start off with a pre-existing community, say a small town or even small city that is now in decline because circumstances have changed and now all the young folk want to live in New York and the factory closed down because it's cheaper to buy Chinese widgets than manufacture them domestically. He'd have a structure already in place and he could try if this scheme would work to re-invigorate the place.
Yeah, if I had a couple bil to blow on a Utopian project, this would seem to be a better way of going about it. Though there would be the the problem that you'd have holdouts that would prevent a complete takeover, especially if you announced it upfront as a project (as people would hold until property values went up and then sell). One strategy might be to start a property investment company, and start buying up everything available, and make unsolicited offers for the rest.
Economically, once the property appropriation had taken place, I would set up communal/individual work spaces, and recruit by touting the town as the "work-from-home center of the future" (as well as encouraging business investment in conventional ways).
What do you have in your new empty city in the desert comparable to "this one restaurant that is being written up with rave reviews by all the critics in the NYT etc. so everybody wants to go there"?
I'd sign up for nice people speaking a language I can grap, some beer store and at least one slightly crazy health-food baker. I'd bring a lot of books, though.
I love how Bali did that, and they attracted a "core fans" group of surfers. They didn't care about infrastructure, and came for the waves, into specific spots.
But, now you have rich Australians and Americans living in the forest, while they can easily afford coffee, good food, clothes etc. And infrastructure started to build up around them.
I live here now and it amazes me how the quality of architecture, food, roads, coffee is on the high level. It's not even everywhere in Europe you could find this amount of fun stuff.
That's the organic way to do it - if it's sustainable. Then again, you get the problem of tourism, where big infrastructure is put in to cater to the foreigners and it changes the entire balance of the locality. Everywhere caters to what the foreigners want, and the locals are reduced to bit-parts and manual labour in their own home place, unable to afford the goods for the rich Westerners to buy.
Spain and the tourist development where blocks and blocks of hotels were slapped up on the coasts with little to no regard for the existing communities is one example. You need to be careful when doing development of this kind, else you could end up with the golden goose dead, the people you want to attract avoid it because now it's become too touristy and the original ambiance that brought them there is gone, and the locals can't support what you built for the rich Westerners, so you have a ghost town.
But done carefully, there's no reason it couldn't work as well as anywhere.
> If I had $25-400 billion to throw around for the movement I could think of a lot more practical bang-for-buck ways to live out the philosophy's goals (and generate real-world empirical tests of whether it lives up to its claims) than building a super city in the desert.
(This will be multi-part due to comment length restrictions)
1. Fund a bunch of empirical research to settle interminable debates about whether certain aspects of Georgism actually work or not
2. If and Only If 1) comes up in the affirmative, pour money into professional education for Assessors bringing them up on the latest and greatest valuation methods that have come out in the last 15 years
3. Get involved in politics, particularly on the local level. Georgism is one of the few political movements that is extremely well poised to get stuff done at the local level and build up from there.
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Background stuff:
I will say, contra Erusian above, that I've already found incredibly strong evidence that Land Value Taxes are not passed on to renters, in multiple well-controlled empirical real world studies. In fact, I was hard pressed to find all that many (empirical) papers that even tried to argue against this finding, especially in the last 15 years. I've got over a dozen papers I can cite here in all and it's all going in the follow-up.
Also, I disagree that mainstream economists are united against LVT -- the likes of Milton Friedman, Joe Stiglitz, and Paul Krugman have all gone on record that LVT is either the most efficient or the "least worst" tax. When they dissent they typically dispute that LVT can raise *enough* because they think land isn't a big enough deal in a modern economy (Krugman's position). Other opponents have a prior philosophical objection rooted in a foundational belief that people have an inherent right to own land untaxed.
Those aren't the only reasons to object, but they're the ones I've seen the most in the literature.
The other big objection tends to be "It's great in spherical cow land, but you just can't do assessments accurately, so it's impossible." That to me is the strongest of the objections and it's the one I'm still researching. The evidence I've seen so far suggests that 1) we've vastly improved on existing methods over the past few decades, 2) it can be done cheaply, accurately and effectively, and 3) can be done with a surprisingly small staff, especially compared to the invasive administrative bureaucracy that other tax regimes demand (e.g. the IRS). I haven't made a final ruling yet because I want to chase this all the way down the rabbit hole, and hopefully find some really good empirical evidence either way so we get beyond the "my dad can beat up your dad" cycle of philosophical objections. I will say that "It CAN be done" is very different from "It IS being done." Just because someone knows how to do something well doesn't mean most people are actually doing it well, and in fact the evidence suggests that in most places the actual as-practiced state of the art is quite poor.
But, let's save that and other arguments for the follow up. Right now, let's just address what I'll do with my billions.
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If you accept the premise that split land/improvement assessment can be done at all, it stands to reason that it can be done better and worse, and that the state of the art could improve through careful study, practice, and the scientific method.
If we also accept the premise that we can get the state of assessment to the point where it is "good enough", and we have *empirically validated* that it indeed has the predicted good effects Georgist asserts, then we move on to getting the word out about it and seeking to implement it on a wider scale.
Working with an organization like the IAAO, the International Association of Assessment Officers, would be top of my list, as they already have a direct pipeline to all the property value assessors in the USA and Canada and a bunch of other places.
So many movements need to pull off a revolution or achieve massive political power before they can get any of their policies implemented, and congress is a massive cluster of gridlock so that ain't ever happening. Just look at the trouble Joe Biden has had trying to pass his latest bills.
BUT! You can implement a partial land value tax in any property tax state RIGHT NOW, just by improving the state of assessment, without changing a single law (well, maybe not in California, what with prop 13, but you could other places). You don't even need to capture statewide office to start doing it. My home state of Texas straight up bans LVT, because you're not allow to do split-rate taxation, and I think you could even do it there.
Here's how:
You already have a hidden split-rate taxation policy based on existing assessments. According to Georgism, the property value is some percent land and some percent improvement, and the status quo taxes the combined value at the same overall rate. If the land is worth more than the improvements, that means the effective rate of tax on land is higher, and vice versa, even if you don't formally acknowledge this in your tax code.
So if you are chronically under-valuing land (as is plainly the case in many states, you just look at what the total property value is assessed for versus what they're actually selling for), and you fix the assessments by just raising the assessed value of the property to match what the market is actually asking for, boom, you've just implemented partial LVT. Before the land was being undertaxed and now it is taxed more in proportion to its value. You don't even really have to change the *rate* of the property tax. And if Georgism is correct, you would expect to see partial, measurable, benefits.
And yes, you need to reform zoning. Georgists are front-line allies in this fight. But even without zoning reform LVT can do its work, because a land's zoning affects its market value, and thus the amount it can command in land rents. But ideally you want to kill stupid zoning ordinances too. That's just a knife fight against the NIMBY's that Georgists simply have to join hands with the YIMBY's on, but from what I can see the tide is starting to break for the YIMBY's.
Okay, so even under hostile tax regimes you can start getting better trained assessors into office who more accurately assess land, and you start getting "partial LVT's" without changing any other formal policy, law, or ordinance.
So how do you get these better trained assessors into office? Either you train them better (through working with the IAAO and reaching existing assessors, or your own local outreach), or you get involved in political campaigns to get new people into office.
Here's the secret:
Nobody pays attention to local elections.
This if the lowest hanging fruit of all time for a movement uniquely able to enact influence through local elections, and Georgism fits the bill to a T.
Property tax assessors get into office in two ways in the USA --
1) by appointment (typically by a county commissioner or suchlike), or
2) by direct election.
I forget the exact figures, but in my local elections recently the commissioner and the tax assessor-collector both ran unopposed (it being a red state). One of them also ran unopposed in their Republican primary, and the other won a 3-way Republican primary by like, a few hundred votes. This is in a county with ~250,000 people and a city with ~100,000. I'm pretty sure a motivated single-issue campaign could start to pick up local offices like these across the country without wasting millions and billions on quixotic races for governor and congress.
So here's the political plan for Georgism (contingent entirely on it actually being a philosophy that works in practice and is therefore worth implementing):
0. Do the research and establish that it works. If not, stop here.
1. Improve the state of real estate assessment methodology
2. Get all the research out and into the training pipeline for assessors
3. Retrain existing assessors already in office & elect new ones across the country
4. Up-assess chronically underassessed property due to insufficiently valued land
5. Get the word out into regular people's brains (podcasts, tiktok, etc)
6. Leverage all the work done above to finally remove state-level barriers to split rate taxation
7. SHIFT existing property tax burdens entirely onto land and off of improvements
8. Raise taxes on land rents as close to 100% as you can and repeal other taxes proportionately (sales, state income, etc)
Explaining 7) real quick -- in most jurisdictions they don't actually tax property at the same rate every year. Instead they first decide how much money they need to raise for their budget -- say $10 million dollars, and then they look at what all the property is worth based on their assessments -- say $500 million dollars, and THEN they set the tax rate. So that would be 2% to capture $10 mil from $500 mil.
So if you have split assessments, you can raise the same $10 million you were already planning on anyway, but raise it *just* from the land portion of the property base, not from the improvements. This is what it means to "shift" property taxes on to land. Property is now taxed based on the value of the location rather than what's built on it.
Explaining 8) -- Remember, "100% of land rental values" is *NOT* "we'll tax you the full price of the land every year" -- that's insane! Instead it's, "we'll charge you the annual rental value of your land in taxes".
You can do all of the above city by city, county by county, state by state, without once ever touching the federal government, just by using existing property tax regimes. And once you've built up a large widespread political power base, with the empirical research to back you up, and saliency in the popular imagination, and most importantly -- widespread proof that it works, being lived out all around in many localities -- **that's** when you enter the federal domain and try to reform things there.
But!
It all has to be actually be true and actually work in practice before any of that is worth doing, so the first thing to fund is research, particularly honing in on disputed areas. And I also really need to just finish my damn article.
Another thing I would LOVE to throw money at to research is the ATCOR theory, the claim that "All Taxes Come Out of Rent." This is where modern Georgists have split opinions. That's because whether or not "Single Tax" is possible (the idea that Land Value Tax is the ONLY TAX you need) hinges entirely on ATCOR being true.
I've done the math and LVT can raise a LOT of revenue, enough to pay for entire sectors of our budget (like defense), but it probably can't pay for anything. Unless ATCOR is true.
ATCOR says that if you say, repeal the income tax, that extra money will flow to landlords in the form of increased rents. So reduce labor/capital taxes, and land values soak it up.
There's another theory (that I've read more about) called the Henry George Theorem (demonstrated by Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz) that says that under certain conditions, money you put into public goods spending gets soaked up by land values.
If ATCOR is actually true in real life, it means that Single-Tax LVT will -- pretty much by definition -- always be able to fund almost any amount of public goods spending. Reduce taxes on income/capital, and land values go up, you tax those at 100% LVT, you spend on public goods, land values go up, you tax that at 100% LVT, you spend some more on public goods, and so on.
If that sounds a bit utopian to you, I wouldn't blame you. ATCOR is a bold claim.
The Henry George theorem on the other hand seems to hold up in my research so far but it's important to know what the boundaries of the "certain conditions" are. And ATCOR I haven't started diving into yet much at all because otherwise I'd never finish my article.
But if ATCOR and a strong version of the HG theorem are both demonstrably, empirically true, the ramifications are HUGE.
I'm currently only like 60% sure that ATCOR holds at the moment, but I would love to see more studies done on it, and this is something I would spend my billions on.
1. By the "Lars" in your name (and... well, the depth with which you're discussing Georgism here) I'm assuming you're the one who wrote the review of "Progress and Poverty"?
Thanks for that, btw, I always meant to read it (ever since I theorised up the LVT-only thing in my late teens*, only to inevitably discover, as one does, that someone else has thought of it over a century before I was even born), but the way you described the constant repwti, I'm probably happier with just your review.
2. When you finish your article, where might I be able to read it?
3. Could you provide some links for some of those "tax not getting passed on to renters" studies you mentioned? I would love to have the concrete evidence.
Especially here in Germany, were
A: nobody's heard of Georgism and
B: the majority of people rent their homes; this is culturally seen as fine. So the headlines aren't "People can't afford homes anymore and this is horrible because they can't get on the property ladder!" (like The Guardian might write in the UK), but rather "The rent is too damn high!", which... you know.
4. I know it's mainly "400 billions" because that was the jumping-off-point because of desert-city-construction cost;
do you have any ballpark estimate for the actual cost of some (single piece of) reasonably useful research regarding
- your point 0: does it even work?
- land value assessment generally
- the ATCOR point
* Basically, it went like this: I read Atlas Shrugged, like many teenagers/young men went like "Yeah! Why should anyone have any right to value *I* produce! Income or value added taxation is theft!"
[pauses and thinks about the bit where Rand explicitly talks about how when you extract natural resources, they're now your property entirely, which did not make sense to me when reading it]
"Wait a minute! Why should anyone have any kind of rights to any land or natural resources that should not reasonably be held by every other person? Land ownership is theft!"
"Therefore, the only philosophically justified tax is one on resources that humanity shoud hold in common."
I felt quite clever until I immediately found George on the internet.
In local elections, don't homeowners have huge power? And also, aren't homeowners the group that is most disproportionately disadvantaged by a land-value tax? It seems to me that this would be a very hard sort of local election to win.
If it were possible to do a coalition of renters and large building landlords, that would be great, but those two groups are very hard to organize in local elections.
They do, and this is an important piece of push-back. Re-reading it now I do seem to have understated some of the inevitable difficulties; this ain't going to be a cakewalk. Point is, it seems *doable* rather than *impossible* as some assert.
My main thesis is just this is more viable than people realize. Importantly, the push-back from "homevoters" is not going to uniform across the entire country, and as rents continue to rise and the housing crisis gets worse and worse the tide has already started to turn towards YIMBY's, as we're already seeing in some areas. And the fact that Georgism is gaining salience is another sign of this turning tide.
Even the true-blue *New York Times* is starting to run pieces like this:
In terms of practical tactics, a lot of it comes down to math. Where are the easy pick up elections. Pick those up. Enact the policy. Study the results. Use those results to gain support for the next territory. Rinse and repeat, slowly march through local governments.
Even with the huge "homevoter" dug in opposition, their eyes aren't always focused on the high bang-for-buck commissioner and tax assessor elections. But of course if Georgists start to make games they'll start to push back.
So I'm not saying it's going to be *easy* -- it will be a fight for sure, politics always is, but it's far from impossible. Compare that to trying to get stuff done at the federal level -- where do you even start?
This is basically trying to move the conversation from "It's completely politically infeasible so we can't and shouldn't even try" to "let's craft a battle plan and see what our best angle is, even though it's not going to be a cakewalk."
Good! I've also been heartened by the substantial YIMBY progress over the past five years or so, even if there still hasn't yet been a huge win, like substantial upzoning around transit stations, or overturning Prop 13. It's slightly worrying that most of the progress has been in blue states, and perhaps even the blue parts of blue states, so that YIMBYism might become seen as a partisan issue, rather than the cross-party divide that we have historically seen.
Georgism is a kind of stand-in for good governance, what is there not to like? The issue of why is a desert is the real utopian notion. We have billions of people in the world who can't all move to a utopian desert town. The idea of throwing everything away and starting fresh is so early 20th century, old-school modernist.
KidCities.org is a way to evolve into a better functioning place.
I continue to be skeptical that siting a charter city in one of the poorest, most violent countries on Earth is a fantastic idea, sorry for being negative. My impression of Latin America as a whole is that it gets convulsed every decade or so by waves of left-wing populism. Sometimes it swings a little right..... only for leftist populism about wealthy elites to rear its ugly head again. If Prospera's successful is any way, I just don't see how a future Honduran demagogue isn't going to ride a wave of popular envy & frustration at the wealthy, mostly non-native folks. That's without even getting into security issues. Developing countries are perpetually 'developing' for a reason.
I'd put a charter city's odds of success as being much greater within a 1st world country. The Nebraska story (it's from 2018) is really interesting! My take on US politics is that during a future recession, at least 1 of the 50 states would be open to such a thing- especially if it offers some immediate tax revenue, a Thiel-type could pay off the legislature that way. Other options could include a remote outpost of a developed country. Most people aren't aware of how many tiny remote islands or random pieces of land major countries control.... from the British Isle of Man to various American outposts (Virgin Islands, Guam, Samoa, some smaller uninhabited islets) to French Suriname or Polynesia. Australia has a bunch of small islands. I'm sure there's many others I'm not thinking of.
Lots of small island countries in the Caribbean are much more politically stable and capital-friendly. Bermuda, Bahamas, Antigua, Trinidad, Saint Lucia..... you're also within the US sphere of influence, so I doubt the security situation could get too bad.
Another option would be to buy a used cruise ship and use it as a perpetual floating platform. Would certainly be expensive! But comes with the benefits of no national laws whatsoever
It's a relatively wealthy island that's a popular tourist destination for Americans with a population that seems to distance itself from the mainland (it's more anglophone for historical reasons, for example)
The whole selling point of Próspera is that "we can start up here free of local regulations because it's a poor area and the national government will be delighted to give us a free hand in exchange for boosting the economy".
Part of "we don't need no regulations" because they're going to be doing it all their way with their own systems and philosophy is going to involve "and if the locals don't like it, tough, there's no way they can enforce their rules on us".
Everyone there has the vague knowledge that they are getting fucked; that they are getting payed .50 cents a day hauling coffee up a hill, and the hacindado is getting $20 a sack for something that magically becomes worth $500 the instant it lands in a white guy's hand.
They remember the shit the US pulled down there in the 60's too, it isn't an academic thing. If you live in half of the continent, you know somebody who knows somebody who's uncle got killed/disappeared by a CIA backed death squad.
This ontop of the rich people in-country not having internalized that you need to hide that shit a little, or the peasants start to get restless.
"If Prospera's successful is any way, I just don't see how a future Honduran demagogue isn't going to ride a wave of popular envy & frustration at the wealthy, mostly non-native folks."
My cynical view on that is if the report is any way accurate, and not slanted because they disapprove of the entire project and want to paint it as hand-rubbing villainy, then Próspera is going about the way I expected it to go in reality.
"In June 2019, Próspera arranged for villagers to elect a new patronato. Monterroso handpicked a slate of candidates, who ran uncontested."
"They've got plans to attract medical and finance (specifically crypto/distributed finance) industries. There's currently a bank going through the "propose your own regulatory code" process."
Not Próspera, but along the same lines:
"Orchid has 400 employees already and the locals are typically doubling their income. They'll start exporting in January 2022. They'll invest $85 million over four years with 2,700 employees eventually. It's the largest greenhouse in Central America, exporting vegetables and flowers, over 160 hectares."
And how they'll pay off the demagogue is the way they're paying off the national government right now: promise to create such wealth that they can operate a slush fund to bribe officials and ministers and ignore or crush local dissent. A smart demagogue will not kill the golden goose, because if the rich foreigners get too squeezed, they can just pack up and leave, and then all you will have is an empty shell and the poor locals who were working for the rich foreigners. Próspera is promising to bring in all these high-tech, high-value, high-earner companies, Orchid is already a going commercial concern. Does the demagogue want to drive them off, or keep skimming from their profits?
"an outcry after Próspera’s armed security guards, responding to a spate of robberies, began asking people coming and going from Crawfish Rock to identify themselves and state their business"
I mean, yeah. What else would you expect? Shifty characters from the locality see a chance to boost valuable construction materials and machinery, theft happens, the private security force has to put a stop to it, the honest locals get inconvenienced, people who have lived there for years and could come and go as they like get really pissed-off about that.
This is why I am also sceptical about "defund the police" initiatives where all problems will be solved by sending in a social worker and a therapist to defuse conflict. Yeah, right. Eventually you need somebody to grab the wrong-doers by the collar and remove them from the site of their wrong-doing, and just asking nicely isn't going to cut it (though I think people can rightfully be angry about a private security firm who are not the police acting as though they are the police).
>grab the wrong-doers by the collar and remove them from the site of their wrong-doing
If the police could be relied on to do that without shooting the wrong-doers dead, there would probably be fewer calls to defund the police or replace them.
"If the police could be relied on to do that without shooting the wrong-doers dead"
What percentage of police interactions end in police killings for unarmed people? There's like 20 or so police killings o unarmed people per year? Our of millions of interactions? And the rate is the lowest it has ever been, right?
The Washington Post's database has 429 unarmed people shot and killed by police in the US since they started recording them in 2015, or 72 per year. If you also include people who were holding toy weapons (248), it rises to 113/year. The rate of police shootings is not very different across any of those 6 years. I don't know where you got "like 20" from.
(Also note that even when someone is carrying a weapon that doesn't mean the police were right to shoot them. Such as the case of Philandro Castile, who is recorded as "a black man with a gun" in this database, but he wasn't trying to shoot anyone - he informed the officer that he was carrying a gun and then got shot when he went to take out his wallet.)
Perhaps 61 per year? I don't know when in 2015 they began tracking. Anyway I don't consider 72 per year to be significantly different from 20 per year. Philando Castile is quite a rarity. And keep in mind that unarmed people would include Michael Brown who was trying to grab a police officer's gun and charging towards him, for example. Do you actually disagree with me that the risk of police shooting dead a wrong-doer is very small?
I used to work with a retired police officer. He mentioned how one of the most dangerous assignments he'd ever seen was going after a man on PCP -- which my coworker had to do multiple times. The standing policy was to send at least three cops, but even 3 on 1, there were often casualties (few fatalities, though). The main problem is that the raging PCP addict is essentially immune to pain, so that rubber bullets and Tasers are completely ineffective (as are pain-holds); and yet, you are absolutely prohibited from shooting him. Often, the only way to bring him down is to contain him as best you can (to prevent him from harming bystanders), and wait for the PCP rage to run out.
I'm not sure what a social worker can do in this situation that a police officer cannot.
Not that cops carry one personally, but in the trunk of the car. (And I know it's easy for outsiders to add "just one more thing" until a police car looks like a clown car, but a net packs up small and completely immobilizes a person, which seems like something cops need to do a lot.)
Literally the first link under "Elsewhere in Model Cities" is the account of a failed attempt on turning a cruise ship into a floating city. Turns out that running and maintaining a cruise ship is monstrously expensive and a regulatory nightmare.
Belize is not "Latin America as a whole", it's Latin America as administered by the British Empire. Well, OK, pirates at first, but *British* pirates, basically working for Queen Elizabeth, and then properly part of the empire for a few centuries. It's not exactly Canada or New Zealand, but it's a distinct culture from the rest of Latin America in more than just language. Probably much closer to the Caribbean island nations you list, but I'd go more Jamaica than Bermuda.
Also, much more central to the US sphere of influence.
I've seen towns and villages founded. Governments incorporated. All that. Not grand visions of social engineering. Just the normal operation of people settling land. Wouldn't it be easier to start on a small scale? Most American colonies started with a few hundred people. So do most new towns. If you want to build a city you need government level resources. But if you want to claim a bunch of land and start your own little utopia you really just need some cheap land a few hundred people. (In the US you can still get free land, by the way.)
It seems to me most of these grand social visions/communes/whatever fail because the people who want to make them lack the actual experience they need. As larius said, if I were a committed Georgist and I had a billion dollars to spend on Georgism this is probably the last thing I'd do. Or maybe they're not really committed to their ideals. They'll move to manifest them but only if it's to another part of Manhattan, effectively.
This also isn't how I'd found any city at all. A lot of times they seem like people who are really good at one thing and think that means they know everything about urban planning or whatever. I note the people founding these cities are almost never real estate professionals, architects, general contractors, whatever. I'm reminded of Bloomberg's comments about how farming is just putting seeds in the ground.
I've generally been pretty tough on Georgism. And I do think Georgism's wrong. But I respect George's theories and the movement's tax lobbying much more than whatever this guy's doing. I think Georgists are wrong on rather technical grounds. I think this guy's got too much money and too little sense. On the other hand, I look forward to another Youtube video about failed utopian communities founded in the American west.
I'm almost done with that follow-up I promised; I'd be pretty interested in knowing what particular technical grounds you had in mind so I can make sure to look into them and address them fully?
Briefly: Georgism is, of course, possible in the sense that the praxis of Georgism is effectively sending agents of the state to extract revenue from landowners. This is not only possible today but is one of the oldest form of taxation. My issue is that Georgism implies that this isn't merely a way to raise revenue but that it has positive economic effects. It effectively says that turning the state into a single, massive landlord would cause benefits beyond the revenues being sent to the common treasury.
Nor is Georgism merely the idea that we could redistribute land or rearraange ownership in a better manner. I believe in land reform myself. It specifically invests itself in the idea that extracting these surpluses will have positive effects, that it's more pareto optimal to tax than not to tax. To put it with maximum bluntness, a Georgist would believe that if you levied a Georgist land tax and then burned the money then this would lead to a more efficient economy. (Not wealthier, since obviously money is getting burned, but more efficient.)
Most modern Georgists are not socialists so they don't run into the original calculation problem. (There were older Georgists who did want to abolish private land ownership. But I think they're mostly gone.) They can value land through transactions. Likewise, while it would require a much greater version of our current land assessment bureaucracy, this is an obstacle to economic efficiency rather than implementation. In other words, assessors might not be able to find the actual value of a property. But this wouldn't stop the state from guessing it and then extracting based on that guess.
Where they run into an actual calculation problem is that their theory implies a disunity. The Georgists understand, as most non-Georgist economists agree, that land taxes at some level extract wealth out of the system and have a dead weight loss in economic activity. Extreme versions of this lead to things like the abandonment of farmland, as in certain Ottoman period. More moderate ones lead to a slowed increase, as in Tokugawa Japan. The Georgist is different from the mainstream in that they assert that taxes below a certain level will not have this effective. They think taxes on the value of land itself, but not on improvements/activity, will not depress improvements/activity. They think it will increase them by leading to a better distribution of land. But Georgists agree taxes above the amount meant to extract the value of the land will decrease economic activity.
This implies you should see a disunion as taxes increase. In other words, if a rental house generates $2,000 in rents and $500 of that is from land then taxing $500 of that (under the Georgist theory) would have no effect on the availability of rental units but taxing $1,000 would. This is where the Georgists run into their calculation problem. Almost no one sells land apart from the improvements. They sell unimproved land but unimproved land is not the same as the land underneath improvements. If you resort to saying the value of the dirt has gone up because a house has gone up then you are absolutely taxing improvements and, even by Georgist standards, should expect a decrease in such activity.
There is no good way to calculate the division of how much of a property's value is land vs improvement. There are few transactions and no way to calculate it. You can create a method that you could apply. But it would be distortionary because it could not be effectively calculated. And if you COULD calculate it, then you still shouldn't be Georgists. You should instead use that calculation to find the highest and best use of the land then allocate it. After all, in that world you have some way of determining the value of any specific hypothetical improvement since you can determine both its building price AND its price effect on the land. Instead, what are proposed are various formulae and dodges like forcing people to sell their property at self-assessment which have their own problems.
None of this gets into the fact that land, being highly inelastic, means that taxes will tend to get passed onto the consumers rather than the producers (ie, renters rather than landlords). You could, of course, keep jacking up the tax. But this will just lead to an arms race. You could just nationalize the land directly but then you're just reinventing socialism. (On this point, in particular, Georgists seem to be outright denying mainstream economic consensus. Everyone else in economics agrees that land has inelastic demand and inelastic goods that are taxed tend to pass the costs onto consumers. But Georgists repeatedly say that landlords can't raise rents despite that being almost the definition of inelastic demand.)
The end state of Georgism is higher property taxes and a larger property tax bureaucracy. We've seen societies like that. Georgism's unwilling to engage in that empirical reality. Georgists are highly allergic to investigating actual land tax regimes for whatever reason. They have never come up with a good defense, as far as I've heard, why every society in history has considered land taxes to be impositions on the poor rather than the land owners. The end of such taxes have almost universally been peasant causes and imposing them has required mass murder and dictatorships. Nor have I seen the economic effects Georgists want to see. We have very good records of how land taxes were levied in Europe and East Asia and the modern world at a variety of rates. I'd expect some empirical evidence.
I further object to Georgism on political grounds. Again, land taxes have generally been a form of control. Independent land ownership has usually been a sign of democratic government where individuals were free from government. The Georgist proposes a massive expansion of government bureaucracy and intrusion into life without seeming to think of the political implications. If we expand the assessors ten fold and the tax court hearings a hundred times then this army of bureaucrats measuring our homes for taxation is on its face undesirable. Not to mention the inherent political unpopularity of such a project means it will tend to crop up (as it did) in more dictatorial regimes.
No problem. Sorry for not being as available as I hoped. If I might pay a compliment, I really do love that Georgism takes land issues seriously and is trying to better that. And while it has its issues it's definitely more anchored to reality and willing to do the work than a lot of ideologies with grand ideas about how to change land tenure. I think it's mistaken but I don't think it's stupid or evil or ignorant. And I think plenty of ideologies ARE that way, especially in regards to land.
I mean either it works or it doesn't, right? No point arguing for centuries about what George "really meant" -- and I think we should have plenty of evidence for everyone to make at least a preliminary judgment once the digging is done.
Damn good summery of Georgism. You may have converted me, unfortunately I am still a little confused on a few points. If you or others could explain where I'm miss-informed I’d be much obliged.
I want to know how to view different types of taxes on a spectrum of progressive to regressive. After reading your comment I am afraid I have miss-classified property taxes.
I currently view the situation as thus:
Sails tax is very regressive
Because poorer people spend a higher percentage of their income on things sold in store and thus subject to the tax.
Income tax is largely regressive
Because poor and middle income people make their money by selling labor and rich people make money from owning stuff and renting it out. Though if you graduate the tax brackets as they do in the USA this effect can be partially mitigated.
Capital gains tax is progressive
Because it taxes returns on capital and only the rich have any capital.
Property tax is progressive
Because the rich always have bigger houses and the rate that their houses increase in value exceeds the rate that their incomes from wages increases. It also improves the general efficiency of land usage as it encourages people to move low value usages out of high value areas.
Users fees are probably regressive
But they are fair, I have trouble seeing why people who walk should pay for the roads that I drive on unless the good or service is non-rivalrous which most services are not.
I live in New Hampshire and feel like the system up here is better for the little guys then that down in mass because the housing costs me the same but I know the people with mansions are actually paying for the schools (I was on a town budget committee school is the tail that wags town government budgets ex: 15 million for school 3 million for every other town service)
Capital gains tax is a little more in the middle. In the US many people own stocks, bonds, rental houses, etc. who don't really fit the "rich" range. Particularly as most retirees are drawing off capital gains to make their previous savings large enough to support them when they have no labor income.
So, yea, capital gains generally is more progressive in that it tends to hit the very rich more, it hits lots of savers/investors and the elderly pretty hard.
Property tax is also a little less progressive than it seems on the surface. While the rich have more property (of the large taxable sort, houses, cars, etc.) the proportion of their income spent on housing and cars is not as large as for the poor. So much like sales tax, property tax is sneakily regressive, or at least not terribly progressive.
At some level, all taxes are regressive because taking money from the poor is more painful for them on the margin than taking money from the rich. Getting around it without just saying "Everyone under X dollars of income or Y dollars of net wealth doesn't pay taxes" which itself has all sorts of problems. The best way to mitigate this problem seems to be on the expenditures side, and just spend as little as possible to avoid having to tax to pay for it. Or at least stop taxing to throw money at rich people subsidies.
Reads to me like a scheme as old as Charles Ponzi: founders sell a brilliant vision that taps into the generic human longing for Utopian on credit, umpty easy equal payments and/or an Underpants Gnome theory of Someone Else paying via sale of Overlooked Valuable Resource X. If the scheme can be sold to enough succeeding levels, then the founders and the first few levels can exit rich, leaving the latecomers rich in experience, if not in actual cash.
But in their defense, this is kind of how a shocking number of Silicon Valley-esque startups operate these days, too. Found Company X with a truly inspiring human-oriented mission statement (no such grubby thing as just earning a honest buck), a glossy website and/or app, build social media buzz, and eventually sell to a greater fool and/or some established firm that is either delusional or cynically wants to suppress you for some usually noncompetitive reason. Everyone who got in on the ground floor exits with a big bag of cash, and the later workers or smal investors get...experience.
Up until now I've never seen these solarpunk-bird's-nest-type towers in the wild, only in visualizations. And technically I still haven't, since this one isn't built yet. Still, it's scheduled to be completed by 2025 and a major tech company is paying for it, so presumably it'll actually happen. Also it's partly made of wood, which seems neat. Lore really could afford two or three of them if that's what he wanted to put his money into.
I hope that artist's impression is not what the reality is intended to be, because it looks so ugly. A bunch of wire flower baskets plopped down amidst Lego constructions, with some 'Blade Runner' type light rail system for that retro-SF future effect, surrounded by scrubby desert shrubs and a line of ant-sized humans walking a road? trail? with no real sense of how far they are from the city towards this random assemblage of buildings under a louring sky.
I think it's meant to be pleasant from inside, since the massive exoskeleton presumably allows you to do away with many of the heavier structural elements that otherwise lie at the core of most big buildings. Of course, the price is you end up looking like your whole lovely natural wood / rooftop garden ecology is behind bars, kind of the ultimate in the gated community look.
About the one in Australia, if the locals don't dub it "the chicken coop" I'll be vastly disappointed 😀
Looking at the 'artist's impressions' with all the greenery on the various floors, those are going to be very labour-intensive to maintain. I'm betting that half the plants are allowed quietly die off or will be replaced by artificial ones a year or two after this thing gets built and opened.
These guys keep looking out in my direction, the American West, I guess because there's a lot of open space here. But one there isn't enough of is water. There isn't really a sustainable supply of water in the West to support the people who are already here.
"Not enough water" is exactly why people weren't building cities in deserts, so unless Telosa can manage to source enough of a reliable supply *and* not bleed it off from the surrounding communities, it is not going to be a runner.
Same problem as with Próspera quoted above, and I don't know if this is reliable reporting or trying to make the guy out a moustache-twirling villain, but this did make me angry:
“Wow,” he said, in a breathy whisper of faux-astonishment, “how terrible, eh? To live in this modern age and lack running water.” He went on: “Running water to your home, such a basic yet transformative and essential service.” A pause for effect. “Who did that?”
Yeah, when I was a young child living out the country in the third quarter of the 20th century, we didn't have running water to our house and we didn't get it until the local farmers started up a group water scheme (because they needed the water for their milking parlours) so I am very well aware of what a boon it is - just turn a tap and here's water! - and I am also very prickly when it comes to people acting like Bond villains over "Kiss my feet for doing this or else go thirsty".
When I read that I couldn't help thinking about how this was over a year and a half and the city hadn't gotten their shit together enough to get water to their citizens. It reminded me of the town I lived near as a kid when their wooden water mains went bad and they started to dig them up to replace them. Then... somehow the money disappeared into mismanagement and corruption, and the town had dug up roads and crap water for years. So when reading about Prospera man saying "Who did that?" I was imagining that in the next fram he turns and looks at the city council and say "You had ONE JOB! Why couldn't you do that?"
This. Prospera stepped in when the city's existing water management failed, so while he is phrasing it like a bit of an arsehole he is IMO right to point out the failures of the previous water supplier
Often I read about water shortages in various parts of the American West. For example, I know of disputes over Colorado River water, rationing in California, water transfers from north to southern California and western to eastern Colorado, and the decline of the Ogallala Aquifer.
However, I have never heard of anyone actually moving away, to a different region, primarily due to these water shortages. It must happen at least occasionally. Is it more common than it seems? Is it at all comparable to the decades of migration *into* the Sun Belt?
Or is water shortage a perennial complaint that often accompanies the revealed preference* of not actually leaving?
If the revealed preference of almost everyone in the American West at present is not actually leaving, despite the water shortages, we should probably be less surprised that 50,000 people might choose to move to Telosa. Especially if there will be minimal farming and minimal water-intensive manufacturing.
* Please tell me if there's a better term than 'revealed preference'.
>With an ever-increasing drier climate, water is the most precious commodity for Telosa. The city will ensure a diverse and clean water supply by utilizing capture and storage systems as well as blue and green infrastructure into the buildings and public realm.
>Water will be distributed efficiently through smart metering and innovative leak detection approaches. The city will capture and recycle water for multiple uses, minimizing the demand on the regional, natural water sources.
Even if the above can be implemented well, what data will Marc Lore consult to make sure the city is built on land that a) has water and b) comes with rights to use that water?
The FAQ mentions that in addition to the American West, Appalachia is under consideration. Water should be less of a problem there.
No one is leaving the West because of water shortages, the actual users of the water are shielded from the shortages by the state (the same way the air is cleaner in Los Angeles today than it was 45 years ago, without a single resident having to change his or her behavior). At most you might be asked to flush your toilet or water your lawn less frequently. No one is moving out because of that. The problem is people continue to move in.
Water is supposed to be a renewable resource, but there are simply too many people depleting the renewable sources and now it is being mined from aquifers that take thousands of years to replenish. So eventually it will run out.
If you want to secure more of the renewable water, you have to build dams, with horrible consequences for the environment. Nonetheless, people with Save the Dolphins bumper stickers have made it clear if ravaging our watersheds is what it takes so they can live comfortably in Los Angeles or Las Vegas (or farm water-intensive crops), so be it.
The classic discussion (and warning) about the West's water crisis is Cadillac Desert. Everyone living west of the Mississippi should read it:
I don't understand why Georgism is incompatible with investors earning money. Just because all property wealth goes to the government doesn't mean the government can't then turn around and give money to investors. It's actually extremely common for governments to give tax money to private investors. It's called paying bond interest. You could also sell equity type bonds where you get a set percentage of tax revenue as a dividend. With normal cities, you'd be at the mercy of voters changing the tax rates, but with Georgist taxes, you'd be guaranteed to make a good return if property values soared. I'm saying any of this is a feature of Telosa, or would be a good idea, but I just don't see how there's a contradiction between Georgism and enriching investors.
The inefficient and disorganized American economy cannot but the Chinese are managing it very well, they're building cities so quickly that people do not even have time to move in.
Building cities is easy (if expensive) but persuading people to live there is hard. China still has about half a billion impoverished rural farmers who are looking for lives as slightly less impoverished urban factory workers, so they can (eventually) fill cities even if they're quite undesirable in most ways. The US has a much slower rural-to-urban flow going on, and these people are pickier about where they want to live; so much so that the US is having trouble keeping well-established cities like Cleveland and Detroit from losing people.
If you spent a trillion dollars (just one measly stimulus bill!) you could probably build a decent sized city from scratch. And if you offered free housing you might be able to get a bunch of people to live there. But the crowd you'd attract with free housing might not be the kind of crowd you'd want to attract.
Actually, this gives me an idea for how you _could_ start a city from scratch. There was a famous quote about facebook being successful because it helped young people get laid. I think there'd be a way to kick start a new city under similar principles; the housing is subsidised at first but you can only move there if you are aged 18-25 and single, and there's a strict 1-1 ratio of men to women.
If you're talking about Auroville, it's not so much that it is "getting large subsidies from the Indian government (which apparently has some kind of sentimental attachment to it)"
They got involved because of rows over who should be running it:
"Prior to 1980, the Sri Aurobindo Society, Pondicherry, legally owned all of the city's assets. In 1980, the Government of India passed the Auroville Emergency Provision Act 1980, under which it took over the city's management. The change was initiated when, after Mirra Alfassa's death in 1973, serious fissures in the day-to-day management developed between the Society and the city's residents. The residents appealed to Indira Gandhi, then Prime Minister of India for an intervention. The Society challenged the Government's action in the Supreme Court of India. The final verdict upheld the constitutional validity of the government's action and intervention.
In 1988, after the verdict, a need was felt to make a lasting arrangement for the long term management of Auroville. The city's representatives along with Sh. Kireet Joshi, then Educational Advisor to the Union government, met for consultations with the then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi. Later that year, the Auroville Foundation Act 1988, was passed by the Indian Parliament. The Act stipulated the vesting of all movable and immovable assets of the city in a foundation, known as Auroville Foundation and the creation of a three-tier governing system: the Governing Board; the Residents' Assembly and the Auroville International Advisory Council. The highest authority is the Governing Board selected by the Government of India. It consists of seven prominent Indians in the fields of education, culture, environment and social service. The second authority is the International Advisory Council, whose five members are also selected by the Government. These are chosen from people who have rendered valuable service to humanity in the areas of Auroville's ideals. The Resident's Assembly consists of all official residents of the city.
The Auroville Foundation, headed by a chairman, is an autonomous body under the Ministry of Human Resource Development. The HRD ministry appoints the seven members of the Governing Board and the five members of the International Advisory Council. There is also a Secretary to the Foundation, appointed by the Government of India, who resides and has an office with supporting staff in Auroville. The Foundation currently owns about half of the total land required for the township. The remaining lands are being purchased whenever funds are available."
And presumably also because the guru or founder, Sri Aurobindo, was an Indian nationalist who supported the movement for independence from Britain before turning to spiritual pursuits and was also influential culturally. It's not just "random cult leader".
The Prospera drama sounds like an indictment of the entire concept, regardless of who captured whose water supply. If Prospera was all that it's advertised to be, then all the surrounding communities would be begging to get in. No one would care about water payments, they'd only care about bumping up their place in line; and anti-Prosperan local tycoons would find themselves with zero support.
But that is not what we see (apparently). We see people treating Prospera as an invader at worst, and an alien neighbour at best. Virtually no one wants to join the utopia.
Wouldn't you agree that it's a bit early to judge? I mean, Jamestown didn't look so hot in 1609, but the English colonization of America still turned out pretty good, despite resistance from the locals.
I do not believe that Prospera is advertised as being all things to all people, so no, it does not follow that all the surrounding communities would be begging to get in. People have a broad range of desires, no polity will be optimized for meeting all possible desires, so *whatever* sort of city you build, lots of people - most people - will say "I don't want to live there, no matter how badly some other people do".
Prospera seems optimized for meeting the desires of (non-euphemistic) rootless cosmopolitans, and aspires to be a tolerably good neighbor to agrarian native Belizians. It may have failed in the latter goal, but "they aren't all lining up to move here" isn't evidence of that.
Beyond the surface level competence issues, I feel these projects are all lacking any kind of meaningful analysis of why people come to hold the views they do. There's just this ambient assumption that people are born leftist authoritarian or libertarian and the only way to create a society with lots of libertarians is to take a bunch, separate them and let them breed. As if libertarianism or the lack of it is genetic.
My guess is the outcome of these projects, in the unlikely event they were to ever get that far, would be that they'd very rapidly start to have problems with 'infiltration' by people who turn out to be leftists. If you look at the history of Bitcoin, one of the few large scale (supposedly) libertarian communities online, after about 5 years it rapidly degraded into a bad remake of Animal Farm, complete with rampant forum censorship, dictators railing against the demands of what they called "the mob", denunciations of the evils of democracy, self-destructive economic policies and even "violent" (DDoS) attacks on anyone who opposed the inner party. A whole bunch of the people who were most loudly proclaiming their devotion to libertarian ideals turned out to, in fact, be some sort of communists-in-denial. It just wasn't obvious until the turn of events forced them to reveal their true natures. Thus a bunch of Bitcoiners are perhaps the worst possible choice to create a floating libertarian cruise ship utopia. They couldn't even sustain a libertarian subreddit!
There are other examples, perhaps of most relevance being tech firms. Google, Twitter etc were once very libertarian organizations. Over time they were successfully hijacked by the authoritarian left to the point that they now treat their platforms as a sort of hunting ground for wrongthink and heresy.
This is especially true because the tendency towards authoritarian leftism is perhaps strongest amongst people with specialized skills who have been, um, "educated"/indoctrinated by the university system. Life experience can take the edge off it, but young+educated are the sorts of people you would need to set up a new city from scratch and the sort of people most likely to sign up without really understanding what it entails (because they are young so have no attachments).
To truly create a stable libertarian society, buying a boat and trying to secede from the world isn't ever going to work. Even if you assume a sci-fi scenario in which they manage to create a self-sufficient and even large community, it would end with lots of shocked pikachu faces when it was put under pressure of some sort and very suddenly devolved into a dictatorship of whoever was best at bullshitting.
What they need is not a factory for sea pods or waste water treatment. What they need is an educational and ideological factory designed to create Thatchers and Regans, but in volume. They need deep analysis of what creates un-libertarian mindsets so they can teach a new generation of leaders how to resist the arguments or calls for leftism and defend themselves against the inevitable (but bogus) attacks on their character or morality. If you don't have this then no amount of sea-steading will create a libertarian society.
Nicely put. Success draws everybody, so filtering for people with principles is a hell of a task. I'd bet Arizona, Texas and Florida would love to find a good way of pulling that off.
>> What they need is not a factory for sea pods or waste water treatment. What they need is an educational and ideological factory designed to create Thatchers and Regans, but in volume. They need deep analysis of what creates un-libertarian mindsets so they can teach a new generation of leaders how to resist the arguments or calls for leftism and defend themselves against the inevitable (but bogus) attacks on their character or morality. If you don't have this then no amount of sea-steading will create a libertarian society.
Pretty ironic that you bring up Reagan in regard to an article concerning Central America, since he signed off on some of the butchery that took there in the 80's. And there's plenty of leftists out there working productively in the sectors of the future (like tech).
Perhaps we're using different definitions of leftist, but I note that hardly a day goes by without some new story of internal chaos, strife and political extremism inside tech firms - and it's always from the left. That doesn't look like working productively to me. And, it was NOT like that when I worked there. The people who had the power to do things like ban content chose repeatedly not to use it. Employees weren't in a constant state of open revolt against management. It's all very different now.
I believe the crucial yardstick, in terms of economic development, would be something like revenue, or maybe even profit. Maybe the 'chaotic' traits go along with the creative and capable ones. And just looking around at the head honchos @ Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, are any of these conservatives?
Damore was fired specifically because he wasn't on the left, so he seems like a rather bad example for whatever point you're making here (that tech isn't really now dominated by the hard left?).
All the tech firms had their success laid in the libertarian period. Google was genuinely committed to making the world's information "universally accessible" in 2014, and Jack was saying "Twitter stands for freedom of expression, speaking truth to power and empowering dialogue" as late as 2015.
It wasn't until Trump broke the left's brains that you saw this hard swerve towards authoritarianism and crushing free speech. But by that point most tech firms had been in existence for years or, in Google's case, nearly two decades. They were certainly founded and grown to their current stature under very different principles than the ones they now use, a change partly due to people just leaving (google) and partly due to wildly over-the-top employee activism combined with a culture that fetishes headcount and 'diversity' above all else.
>> Damore was fired specifically because he wasn't on the left, so he seems like a rather bad example for whatever point you're making here (that tech isn't really now dominated by the hard left?)
(a) No, he certainly wasn't fired "specifically because he wasn't on the left". He misinterpreted some studies, and made a bunch of dubious claims about gender-based outcomes in his workplace.
(b) This went to your claim on 'chaos' in the workplace being exclusive to leftist progenitors.
>> It wasn't until Trump broke the left's brains that you saw this hard swerve towards authoritarianism and crushing free speech.
Hyperbole. There's plenty of free speech on the social media platforms, and imo they let too much go unchecked, in terms of misinformation and false claims.
>> They were certainly founded and grown to their current stature under very different principles than the ones they now use, a change partly due to people just leaving (google) and partly due to wildly over-the-top employee activism combined with a culture that fetishes headcount and 'diversity' above all else.
I don't think there's any "certainly" to that at all. These firms have probably always had left-leaning work forces, given the universities they prefer to hire from.
"No, he certainly wasn't fired "specifically because he wasn't on the left". He misinterpreted some studies, and made a bunch of dubious claims about gender-based outcomes in his workplace."
Yes ... dubious claims which weren't on the left. What else could it possibly mean to be fired for your beliefs, if not being fired for the things you claim?
If you're acting on your lefty principles *on the job* then pretty much by definition you're subtracting from productivity, not enhancing it. That's in the core mission statement of leftism, you know: the whole point of being a collectivist/socialist is that you think maximum economic productivity is *not* the primary goal, and in fact you believe some economic inefficiency should be encouraged in order to spread the wealth more equally, i.e. we take (by force) from the more productive Peter to help the less productive Paul, on moral or aesthetic grounds, e.g. because we think Peter is rich enough and Paul is unproductive (and poor) through no fault of his own, e.g. because he has a birth defect or suffered some terrible accident. So if redestributing wealth against the wishes of its current owners is *part of your job* then by definition you're not contributing to productivity. You may be achieving some other social goal -- equity, or harmony, or whatever -- but the one thing you're *not* doing is maximizing production.
>> That's in the core mission statement of leftism
There is no core mission statement of leftism. E.g., Not everyone on the left is a marxist. You're kind of doing what Damore did here, painting with the broad brush.
I guess you're trying for an inversion with the rest of the post - inferring that you can't be a REAL leftist and still contribute to a rise in productivity at the same time? No, (again, for example) the idea of socialism is centered around efficiency in production - it's just best achieved with the modes of production in the hands of the state.
Of course there's a core mission statement. There's no point to having and naming a philosophy unless you actually stand for some principle or other. You may not like the way I phrased it, of course, in which case, feel free to suggest some other, but the idea that you can have a philosophy *without* a central guiding principle is illogical.
No, the idea of socialism is most certainly *not* centered around efficiency in production. I mean, not unless you want to argue that human beings are sort of by nature anti-greedy, and always choose the path of lowest economic growth and poor personal reward if they possibly can -- so we need collectivists to force us to be more efficient and get more material rewards. I mean, that's a point of view, but I've never heard anyone seriously propound it, it's kind of strange. Normally the socialist says humans are naturally greedy and love material comfort, and collective action is needed to prevent that from dominating their decisions.
I've never heard any socialist, or socialist adjacent person (someone "on the left" that is) say anything other than that the priority of their philosophy is to put some human value or aesthetic or social justice whatever *above* pure profit, that is, as I said, the idea is to trade some extra increment of economic value achieved for some extra increment of aesthetic or moral good.
To be sure, many of the less thoughtful (or those who think they can scam the gullible) will argue that there *is* such a thing as a free lunch -- that you can get that extra increment of aesthetic or moral good *without* sacrificing anything at all in terms of economic output or average material comfort. I put these folks in the same category are those who believe the Federal budget can be balanced by cutting out "waste" or those who hawk perpetual motion machines, very amusing but not to be taken seriously.
>> There's no point to having and naming a philosophy unless you actually stand for some principle or other.
Leftism is not a philosophy. It's a political category which you might say encompasses a group of philosophies. These do not all share uniform objectives. Communists seek the seizure of the modes of production by the proletariat. Socialists believe that some production should be socialized, but are more prone to favor bureaucratic/technocratic administration. Social democrats (and permutations thereof) want a combination of market economies and generous social safety nets. White bourgeois liberals in the US may be primarily preoccupied with identity politics, while maintaining lesser (than European) welfare policies.
>> You may not like the way I phrased it, of course, in which case, feel free to suggest some other
I didn't like the way you phrased it because (a) it was reductionist and deformative, meant to convey more of an opinion than a definition, (b) wrong, because leftism is not a philosophy (see above)
>> No, the idea of socialism is most certainly *not* centered around efficiency in production.
In its actual historical and experimental forms, it most certainly was/is. The Soviet mechanization of farming, Stalin's 5-year plans, China's public works were all meant to contest Capital's claim to efficiency, by contrasting collectivism (in production) to market competition. Whether or not they achieved it in all or any instances can certainly be debated. But your blanket dismissal is inaccurate.
I would also point out that European socialization of health care insurance is absolutely geared towards greater efficiency - reducing administrative costs, and leveraging scale in negotiating prices.
To be fair, Stalin's industrialization initiative was demonstrably successful; however, it was built upon massive amounts of slave labor, so there might be, shall we say, a few ethical issues involved.
Er...leftism is not *a* philosophy, it's a *collection* of philosophies? OK. Still doesn't vitiate the original point, just throws a lot of chaff around. Either there is some core uniting principle of that collection, something that deserves to be marked off and called "leftism" -- or the label "leftism" is void of meaning. Let me know which you choose, because you can only pick one.
Whether socialist regimes *also* intended to do the best they could economically is entirely beside the point. Any philosophy (particularly a governing philosophy) has numerous subsidiary goals. But the point still stands that the *primary* #1 top-level this before anything goal of socialism is certainly not economic efficiency and maximum economic production. It kind of baffles me that this is even debatable to you -- why even *call* it "socialism" if collective good is *not* your primary goal? Why not just call yourself a "capitalist," hmm? Why make a big fuss of contrasting yourself with those grubby capitalist who only think about making a buck -- if that's *your* primary concern, too?
European socialization of health care costs is certainly not aimed at driving down the average cost, it's designed to ensure that people who cannot afford the average cost still have access. Very different thing. And clearly it cannot reduce administrative costs if *on top of* the ordinary costs of running health care you have to have a vast national bureaucracy that shifts huge amounts of money around and is responsible for ensuring it's spent "fairly" by whatever definition of the word that means. That's as illogical as thinking that if I add fourteen layers of middle management to a factory my administrative costs will go down. Say what? That never happens.
Certainly the average cost of European healthcare is cheaper, but there is reasonable evidence that is because it *does* less -- because its outcomes in the case of serious disease or trauma are worse (European rates of survival of cancer post diagnosis are noticeably poorer than American, as is survival of preterm babies). And because it rations care -- you have only to look up waiting times for diagnoses and procedures to hear an earful about this.
To be sure, reasonable men can differ on the source of a reduction of average health care expense, but it would be tremendously naive to just assume the quality of care, quality of outcomes, and issues such as rationing are identical everywhere, and attribute differences to some hypothetical reduction in administrative overhead.
To be fair though, Progressives claim that a demographically balanced (or "diverse", in their terms) workplace is more economically efficient than one staffed solely by straight white males. They have some studies (of varying quality) to support this. The common proposed mechanism is that a demographically diverse set of people produces a diverse set of viewpoints (given that one's viewpoint is primarily linked to one's demographic category), which enables them to produce many unorthodox solutions to difficult problems.
I don't think that's in contradiction with my original claim. The other guy was basically claiming that with 'leftists' around, you can't have effective planning of communities or productive businesses. I don't buy that, in terms of the present or future.
He was bringing up Thatcher and Reagan, who never really built anything, that I can recall. They were arch-conservatives who came in and gutted existing government programs. Not sure how they came up in this context.
Um, yeah, I was pointing out the same thing. That said though, the Libertarian/Capitalist position (as I understand it) is that it is *impossible* to have an effective centrally planned economy. Obviously, individual businesses can be planned (indeed, they have to be); but centrally planning the entire economy of a large nation is a task that is beyound any entity other than perhaps God (or some sort of Singularity-grade AI, which is the same thing). Thus -- according to this view -- centrally planned economies will always underperform (in the long term) as compared to free markets.
My own personal opinion is that mixed economies tend to perform best. I don't claim to be some sort of an economic genius, I merely observe that the most successful economies in existence today are all mixed. China's productivity tanked to the point of self-destruction when they went the full planning route; it recovered dramatically once they started introducing free-market elements. Stalin industrialized Russia by fiat, but only at the expense of putting about half the country (arguably, all of it !) into slave labor camps; and his achievement did not have a lot of staying power. On the flip side, places with no economic controls whatsoever tend to be known as "failed states", and they aren't fun places to be, either. Meanwhile, Western-style democracies, while far from perfect, appear to be doing reasonably well.
>> but centrally planning the entire economy of a large nation is a task
I think market economies work at the street level, when actual value is being produced. People making goods, pouring beers, etc, and others are paying for them. Pernicious local regulation of non-predatory small business should be avoided.
Some problems arise when you reach a stage where an economy becomes highly financialized and abstract. Like when US capitalism collapsed in '08-09 after the failure of mortgage-backed securities and the subsequent cascade, and had to be propped up by the government. (Covid did the same thing, and the supply line crisis is interesting, in that it seems to be a problem that can't be readily fixed).
In addition, there's currently a pattern of extractive capitalism - big investors buy up companies, hollow them out with layoffs and outsourcing/whatever. Chains come in and drive local businesses out of operation, sucking money out of communities and sending it to shareholders somewhere else. Amazon and platform dominance. It's a big vacuum sucking the money away into fewer and fewer hands.
America has a centrally planned economy. It's just that the center is Wall St.
>> My own personal opinion is that mixed economies tend to perform best.
I roughly agree. But I think societies chained to money will always move through cycles of pleasure and pain. But what are you gonna do?
>deep analysis of what creates un-libertarian mindsets
This sort of thing would of course be good and useful, but it's hilariously out of reach of humanity's current capabilities. When psychology still struggles with the replication crisis on issues as trivial as "is priming even a thing?" developing a robust sociological model which could adequately answer those kinds of questions is about as far from here as the nuclear reactor was from a caveman. Social "sciences" can be called that only aspirationally, yet people often act as if they're already almost as useful as physics.
I am a little more optimistic here. While the modern social sciences are a mess, there has been a lot of work historically on human behavior and tendencies that is valuable. At least as a starting point for someone interested in the project.
Has there? Had any falsifiable theories emerged and stood the test of time? To me, what seems to have happened, then and now, is that talented storytellers cherry-pick some historical records, dubious statistics and folk wisdom and craft from those ingredients whatever narrative pleases them (or their wealthy and powerful patrons).
Falsifiable is not a bar you are likely to clear here. If you are looking for something along the lines of "Do A,B,C...X,Y, and Z and your children will turn into citizens with these characteristics" you will always be disappointed. If you are looking for something along the lines of "These causal factors tend to result in people behaving more like X, most of the time," that is probably a more reachable goal. Getting anything so complicated as human behavior down to the level of physics is grossly over optimistic, but recognizing patterns that lead to other patterns in a robust, predictable way is probably within reason.
Adam Smith, David Hume, Cicero, Grotius, they all made some pretty enduring contributions to understanding what makes humans work.
I'm not saying that narratives are completely worthless, but philosophy isn't science, and I think that the status which the latter earned due to the overwhelming success of its practical applications unduly leaks to the former. Maybe because they're both parts of the enlightenment project, or their purveyors tend to work in the same institutions and carry the same titles (or are sometimes even the same people). But the accuracy and usefulness of insights produced by these activities isn't remotely comparable, probably differs by orders of magnitude, which is prudent to acknowledge.
I think there is a space between philosophy and physics/engineering you are neglecting here. Consider plant and animal breeding. We've been doing it for years, and while we can't get exactly the outcomes we want every time (ignoring modern bioengineering for a moment) we can move in a general direction and know what to avoid. It doesn't work 100%, and sometimes we don't know why exactly, but it works on whole.
Lots of sciences work like this. Chemistry as done industrially is surprisingly hit or miss, for instance. There is just too much going on that can affect the process to get things perfect, but on whole it works.
I suspect that teaching ethics and morality, philosophy all together, to people such that they adopt more libertarian or other values as opposed to others is likewise workable on whole. It might turn out there is a big genetic component, and maybe a big "random stuff we don't know" component, but I would be surprised to find that it is entirely impossible to inculcate a culture within the realms of human nature. I mean, different places have different cultures just by virtue of people growing up there and raising their own kids there, so culture must be transmissible to a fair extent. I would be very surprised to find that, given genetics etc., we couldn't steer that culture one way or the other.
Plato posited a Utopian framework in his dialogue "The Republic" but towards the end of his life he realized it would only work if "virtue" was inculated into its citizens *before* they lived there. Otherwise,they would eventually ruin it. He proposed something called a "Great Prelude" in his "Laws" dialogue that would do exactly that.
Arguably, Plato realized the Republic wouldn't work when he wrote it. He starts out saying "Well, I don't think I can tell you how to make the ideal city, but what the hell."
Yet he kept working on it and refining it (see "The Laws"), so he must have believed on some level it was worth investigating for real world purposes. And the concept of the Academy did become a thing.
That's the interesting bit I think. It seems possible that he knew Utopia was out of reach, but wanted to keep moving in that direction to see how far it could go, what were good things to do that humans could actually achieve. I don't have a strong feeling either way, other than a suspicion that he thought Utopia was totally possible if humans were willing to go far enough when writing the Republic. Something about Plato always makes me think he believes he sees through the shadows to reality, and so believes he could remake humanity into something better if he just had access to enough power.
"and so believes he could remake humanity into something better if he just had access to enough power."
Which is really the essential tug of war between conservative and progressive philosophies being debated on this post today, no?
Many creation myths seem to depict a utopian society that is falling apart (usually intergenerational infighting among people with godlike powers), and then the world is born. Not enough virtue before handing out godlike powers, Plato would have said.
So maybe you'd need a "world" to grow people up into virtuous beings, a Great Prelude if you will, and only then would you be allowed to live in Utopia. Or Heaven. Or the Metaverse. Or whatever the kids are calling it these days.
Interesting angle. I have always seen creation stories as an explanation for why the world is empirically so nasty when the gods are supposedly so good. Sort of a cosmic apology to solve the problem of evil; you gotta have some evil power the gods stopped, but not completely, some big fall out between gods that wrecked the perfect world, or just humans being dicks, to explain why the world is so hostile to humans. Otherwise the transition from the more ambivalent or outright hostile pantheons towards the virtuous pantheons that rule through love can't happen.
I don't know how much time in the wilderness, as it were, is necessary to get people towards non-utopian-but-merely-low-state-involvement society's requirements for virtue. I am, sadly, suspicious that we are by nature doomed to swing between authoritarian/totalitarianism and anarchy, never able to settle on a stable "Hey this is pretty decent!" level long term. Perhaps without experience in the hellish states of the world we don't have the sense to stop picking at "pretty decent" and leaving it alone.
A few decades ago I spoke with a Brazilian man who was very upset with the telecom liberalization in Brazil (I was visiting Brazil at the time).
According to this gentleman, big private companies were gouging Brazilians and making billions. I asked, innocently enough, "did you pay less before?" and the answer came without any awareness that it may be seen as undermining his previous rant: "Oh no, I didn't have a phone before; in the old system, it was so expensive only rich people could afford it."
Well, there is obviously much to be said on both sides, and we're not getting an unbiased account from anyone. But if the new lot come in with "hey, seeing as how you're stuck for water, we'll share our supply with you" and it is *perceived* as charitable aid but then they find out that there's a price tag attached, and if taps are turned off when the new lot don't get their way - it's fine to say "nobody was doing this before", but if you are going to do it, be upfront about it. Say "we're willing to sell you water but you have to pay for it".
Because whatever the truth of the matter is, the people in Crawfish Rock don't have water when the taps are turned off, and if they're dependent on Próspera, then they are going to be ruled by Próspera, be that de jure or de facto.
I think we should take a look at real new built cities in the desert for a model of what they might be like - hey, just so happens Dubai has a programme of building absurdly grandiose projects to attract tourism and well-heeled investors.
And it runs on what some might describe as slave labour. They need a ton of foreign labour for the construction work, as well as working in service industry jobs, and if you're not a Western ex-pat in a white-collar job, the conditions are not so nice:
And that's what I wonder about projects like these. Telosa *sounds* extremely well-intentioned, but good intentions aren't enough. To make it work, frankly, I think you have to select your proposed population so that they're generally all of the same socio-economic class (you can be as racially and sexually and gender diverse within that as you like) so that everyone is starting off from pretty much the same level. That means you'll avoid sorting out into the 'nicer/better' areas of the city and the less nice ones.
But if everyone is an investment banker or IT whiz, who is going to work in the shops and drive the bin collection lorries and so on? Well, while I would love to think the kids of the janitor and the investment banker are all going to go to the same school and be in the same class with the same access to the best teachers and resources, I don't see that happening. Either there will be schools for the (diverse) investment bankers' kids and schools for the (diverse) janitors' kids, or there will be one set of schools for all, the well-heeled parents will go "How nice", and then hire private tutors for their kids outside of school.
So you have (1) the low-level workers living in the city, which is going to lead to that kind of sorting out into neighbourhoods for the better-off and for the lower middle class or (2) letting the shop assistants and cleaners and janitors and so forth come in to work for the day/night shifts from elsewhere and go home after they've done their day's work, but not live in the city proper.
As for Próspera, yeah, I'm dubious. There probably is a local power struggle going on, but whoever controls the water supply is going to control the area. Whatever they say, if Crawfish Rock is depending on Próspera for water, and paying water bills to Próspera, then eventually they will be absorbed into Próspera. As for the rest of it - the promised economic upturn due to an influx of new jobs not turning out that way, as outsiders are getting the contracts? Again, I'm not surprised, because this is usually how such matters turn out. It happened in Ireland, where big projects were announced by government with promise of X many construction jobs while the thing was being built, then turning out that a British or other firm got the contract.
Honestly hearing the state of things in Prospera makes me optimistic they'll *succeed.* It indicates that they're not afraid to get down and dirty to secure their future, and also don't fold at the first public criticism. Which like it or not, is imo a good indicator of success.
On the subject of building utopian cities in the American desert, have you considered looking at the Mormon tradition of city building?
Brigham Young is by far the most prolific American city planner, with hundreds of cities and towns across the western US. The most successful ones have been Salt Lake City (obviously), Mesa AZ, and San Bernadino CA.
> I’m probably biased here, but I trust Devon more than I trust some anti-tech e-zine.
Based on context, I assume that e-zine is Rest of World. But their "3 minutes with" series https://restofworld.org/series/3-minutes-with/ with the pitch "Get to know the people at the forefront of the global tech industry." is basically a channel for tech startups to promote themselves; and their listicles https://restofworld.org/series/lists/ seem clearly aimed at wannabe tech entrepreneurs who want to make it big in, y'know, the rest of the world.
So what gave you the impression they're anti-tech? That they published an article critical of Próspera? That seems like self-serving reasoning: you dismiss the article because you dislike the source because they published the article you want to dismiss. Maybe you shouldn't trust your friend to be a good judge of character either, because he's probably not immune to the same kind of bias.
> their only condition was that the city officially say they wanted it, which sounds like a pretty reasonable demand with the news coverage being what it is.
When you're in a position of power, using that power to try and force a symbolic display of submission might be a very human desire, but actually doing so makes you look like a tyrant who'll do anything for an ego boost. Don't expect it to lead to better news coverage.
If the issue is a possible water monopoly, then the patronato's plan to restore the old water supply would lead to market diversification and retaliating against that isn't reasonable at all. If they cut off Próspera afterwards, it would reveal the patronato's motivations to be unambiguously selfish. (That's also what it sounds like in Devon's telling of the story.)
That isn't to say that the patronato's refusal to submit is reasonable either. If I were in their position, I'd have accepted Próspera's terms, while making clear to the other locals that the ultimatum shows that depending on Próspera's water is too risky, and we should restore the old water supply as soon as possible.
>> When you're in a position of power, using that power to try and force a symbolic display of submission might be a very human desire, but actually doing so makes you look like a tyrant who'll do anything for an ego boost. Don't expect it to lead to better news coverage.
+1 to whole post, though I would add there's a historical element in play as well. Big American Capital, working in concert with the US Government, has inflicted plenty of misery on Central American countries (see United Fruit for starters). They're right to be suspicious. And culturally, I think a lot of us Americans tend to read events like this from a chauvinistic perspective, that springs form intuitive comparison of our more advanced technological society, with theirs. Stepping back, you kind of realize that some technological 'advances' are making our society sicker, and it may not be the case that everyone everywhere wants to buy in to the whole package.
But water is a baseline social good, and it's possible the local leader (Brimen) is grandstanding for potential political game. Though it's also possible Prospera wasn't well enough apprised of the potential for pushback, and the tensions could escalate. Going to be interesting to see how it plays out.
Is China implementing Georgism in its own way? IIRC in China, much like in Singapore, almost all land is owned by the government. What you get when you “buy” a property is a 99 year lease. Interestingly, out past something like 50 years, leasehold property and freehold property sell for the same price.
In the case of China, the vast majority of local government revenue comes from selling these leaseholds. That seems sorta Georgist is a way.
"In late October, Cárdenas and Connor received an unsigned letter from the Próspera Foundation, a new name for the charitable organization Monterroso oversees. The foundation had heard that the pair were looking at ways of restoring Crawfish Rock’s old water supply. The letter said that the foundation assumed that meant they no longer wanted to access water from the ZEDE’s well, and was going to cut them off in 30 days’ time."
What set Prospera off was Crawfish Rock just *talking* about setting up its old water system. So Prospera cut off the water, presumably before Crawfish could build its own supply. At this point, if I lived in Crawfish Rock, I would view Prospera as an enemy, and any supply they offered as unreliable.
****
As for why cities form, I assume it's favorable trade conditions. Delany's theory that cities attract people from sexual minorities is at least plausible, and might have political implications.
Eh. You can sorta see it from their point of view. Something like, "We've been giving you free water and you've been badmouthing us as imperialist assholes. That's sucks. We're happy to keep giving you water, but you have to ask nicely." Sure, it's kind of a jerk move, but having someone to whom you're giving charity badmouth you is not a fun experience.
Of course, having someone who is giving you charity rub your face in it is presumably also not fun, so you can see why the locals would tell them to go pound sand.
I don't know if I have mentioned it on these threads before but there are some examples of successful start up cities in the US that might be a model for a place like prospera. I am posting from one right now.
The Woodlands TX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woodlands,_Texas was started by oil investor George Mitchell and has grown from 8000 in 1980 to 100,000 population today. It is still not an official city but instead is run by the Howard Hughes Development corporation.
I'm not sure I understand. When you say 'chaos,' do you mean at least several hours a day of unstructured time within otherwise fairly orderly physical and social circumstances?
What I like about Auroville is that it seems very bottom-up. It’s likely that Auroville-like foundings happen periodically, with a few becoming empires one day, the rest being absorbed by the mainstream. I was impressed by what the Rajneeshees accomplished in a short time in Oregon (See Netflix).
Built (inspired and developed by) Tom Monaghan of "Domino's Pizzas", it's built around the Ave Maria university, which Monaghan moved to Florida after he was denied planning permission to extend the college he built in Michigan.
"Ave Maria, Florida is an unincorporated community that was founded in 2005 by Ave Maria Development Company, a partnership consisting of the Barron Collier Companies and the Ave Maria Foundation led by Roman Catholic philanthropist Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza and the leader of Ave Maria University at the time. Monaghan served as chancellor of Ave Maria University until February 2011. The development of the town was made possible when the Florida legislature created the Ave Maria Stewardship Community District, a limited local government whose purpose is to provide community infrastructure, including community development systems, facilities, services, projects, and improvements. In 2015-16, it was ranked the 40th top-selling master planned community in the United States, out of 230 such communities tracked. It earned the "Community of the Year" for seven consecutive years (2015-2021). In 2020 it broke its previous record for new home sales - selling 507 new homes during the year and ranking 38th on the list of Top Master Planned Communities in the USA. In January 2021, 77 new homes were sold in Ave Maria - an all-time monthly sales record for the town. Ave Maria was most recently names in the Top 25 Master-Planned Communities in the USA and is over 450 home sales for the year as of September 1, 2021."
It's conservative, it's Catholic, I have no idea what it's like to live there but it's survived for 16 years and I haven't yet heard any major scandals about it (there have been some ruffled feathers around the university). So it is possible to found a small city/town and get it to work.
"I like Georgism as much as anyone else, but I’m not sure a new city in the desert is the right place to try it. Land in the desert is already really cheap."
I suspect that there may in fact be a reason why you can buy desert for so cheap.
A girlfriend of mine in college studied abroad in Auroville. She mentioned the cult-like atmosphere and failed cashless economy, but didn't seem to have any issues with safety. I do remember that their internet was good enough to support Skype calls, and in 2012 at that.
(Aside: I never studied abroad and always thought of it as a kind of indulgent rich-kid thing to do. Of course, going to Auroville pretty much maxes out on the "find yourself" model of study-abroad.)
It is probably just me, but when I read the Telosa's diversity and inclusiveness statements I just assume this is code language for:
"We will use the natural and inevitable diversity in outcomes between people and cultures as an excuse to totally social engineer anything and everything we would like."
Why does Substack not have a "Report spam" button?
I've never heard of Oriana, but since you clearly have why don't you summarise it a bit here, explain its relevance and your cryptic comment about it being Kryptonite?
Well, basically, it's a little village which is for white Boers only.
It was founded shortly after the end of Apartheid and was built entirely with white Boer labor, as well. This is actually allowed under the SA constitution (freedom of association) but obviously they're a reliable bugbear for left-wing and intellectual circles in South Africa, though from what I've seen they usually focus on the concept being fundamentally wrong instead of any particular conduct: they're not a sun-down town and I don't believe there's ever been an anti-black hate crime there. What's funny is that from what I can tell if it weren't for the ethnic separatism angle they'd be a bit of a center-left darling: they don't have a proper police force, just a small security team, and they have a direct democratic council-style government.
For the record I don't quite know what to think of Telosa either, and a bunch of my Georgist friends are kind of confused about it. If I had $25-400 billion to throw around for the movement I could think of a lot more practical bang-for-buck ways to live out the philosophy's goals (and generate real-world empirical tests of whether it lives up to its claims) than building a super city in the desert.
Ok, but what's your opinion on Georgism?
Clearly she's pro-Georgist. No frills, naturally nude, nothing added on by landlords trying to capture value they have not created!
Wow, larsiusprime, what is the secret of your success with women? 🤣
O for a "like" button!
To their credit, one of the guys working on the project showed up in one of the Seminars I was attending with Ted Gwartney (a noted Georgist assessor[1]), and I have his email address if you want to put any pointed questions to them.
[1] http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/Gwartney_Estimating_LV.html
It's perfect. If the city succeeds, he can say Georgism must be true because a Georgist city succeeded. If he fails, he can say Georgism must be true because he as a landowner was unable to create value for the land.
A georgist city (Singapore) already more than succeded
It probably doesn't hurt that Singapore is strategically located and has a natural harbor to boot.
Yeah, you'd imagine he'd start off with a pre-existing community, say a small town or even small city that is now in decline because circumstances have changed and now all the young folk want to live in New York and the factory closed down because it's cheaper to buy Chinese widgets than manufacture them domestically. He'd have a structure already in place and he could try if this scheme would work to re-invigorate the place.
Starting off on a clean slate in the desert sounds great, but you have to entice people to live there, and part of why people say they like or want to live in NY or LA or SF is "the access to great museums, art galleries, theaters, opera and music, restaurants, vibrant night life, vibrant creative world, energy and enthusiasm, chance to make it big, all the big name companies are there".
What do you have in your new empty city in the desert comparable to "this one restaurant that is being written up with rave reviews by all the critics in the NYT etc. so everybody wants to go there"?
>> Yeah, you'd imagine he'd start off with a pre-existing community, say a small town or even small city that is now in decline because circumstances have changed and now all the young folk want to live in New York and the factory closed down because it's cheaper to buy Chinese widgets than manufacture them domestically. He'd have a structure already in place and he could try if this scheme would work to re-invigorate the place.
Yeah, if I had a couple bil to blow on a Utopian project, this would seem to be a better way of going about it. Though there would be the the problem that you'd have holdouts that would prevent a complete takeover, especially if you announced it upfront as a project (as people would hold until property values went up and then sell). One strategy might be to start a property investment company, and start buying up everything available, and make unsolicited offers for the rest.
Economically, once the property appropriation had taken place, I would set up communal/individual work spaces, and recruit by touting the town as the "work-from-home center of the future" (as well as encouraging business investment in conventional ways).
What do you have in your new empty city in the desert comparable to "this one restaurant that is being written up with rave reviews by all the critics in the NYT etc. so everybody wants to go there"?
I'd sign up for nice people speaking a language I can grap, some beer store and at least one slightly crazy health-food baker. I'd bring a lot of books, though.
Decent book stores would be nice, but less urgent these days.
I love how Bali did that, and they attracted a "core fans" group of surfers. They didn't care about infrastructure, and came for the waves, into specific spots.
But, now you have rich Australians and Americans living in the forest, while they can easily afford coffee, good food, clothes etc. And infrastructure started to build up around them.
I live here now and it amazes me how the quality of architecture, food, roads, coffee is on the high level. It's not even everywhere in Europe you could find this amount of fun stuff.
That's the organic way to do it - if it's sustainable. Then again, you get the problem of tourism, where big infrastructure is put in to cater to the foreigners and it changes the entire balance of the locality. Everywhere caters to what the foreigners want, and the locals are reduced to bit-parts and manual labour in their own home place, unable to afford the goods for the rich Westerners to buy.
Spain and the tourist development where blocks and blocks of hotels were slapped up on the coasts with little to no regard for the existing communities is one example. You need to be careful when doing development of this kind, else you could end up with the golden goose dead, the people you want to attract avoid it because now it's become too touristy and the original ambiance that brought them there is gone, and the locals can't support what you built for the rich Westerners, so you have a ghost town.
But done carefully, there's no reason it couldn't work as well as anywhere.
> If I had $25-400 billion to throw around for the movement I could think of a lot more practical bang-for-buck ways to live out the philosophy's goals (and generate real-world empirical tests of whether it lives up to its claims) than building a super city in the desert.
Say more?
> Say more?
You asked for it!
(This will be multi-part due to comment length restrictions)
1. Fund a bunch of empirical research to settle interminable debates about whether certain aspects of Georgism actually work or not
2. If and Only If 1) comes up in the affirmative, pour money into professional education for Assessors bringing them up on the latest and greatest valuation methods that have come out in the last 15 years
3. Get involved in politics, particularly on the local level. Georgism is one of the few political movements that is extremely well poised to get stuff done at the local level and build up from there.
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Background stuff:
I will say, contra Erusian above, that I've already found incredibly strong evidence that Land Value Taxes are not passed on to renters, in multiple well-controlled empirical real world studies. In fact, I was hard pressed to find all that many (empirical) papers that even tried to argue against this finding, especially in the last 15 years. I've got over a dozen papers I can cite here in all and it's all going in the follow-up.
Also, I disagree that mainstream economists are united against LVT -- the likes of Milton Friedman, Joe Stiglitz, and Paul Krugman have all gone on record that LVT is either the most efficient or the "least worst" tax. When they dissent they typically dispute that LVT can raise *enough* because they think land isn't a big enough deal in a modern economy (Krugman's position). Other opponents have a prior philosophical objection rooted in a foundational belief that people have an inherent right to own land untaxed.
Those aren't the only reasons to object, but they're the ones I've seen the most in the literature.
The other big objection tends to be "It's great in spherical cow land, but you just can't do assessments accurately, so it's impossible." That to me is the strongest of the objections and it's the one I'm still researching. The evidence I've seen so far suggests that 1) we've vastly improved on existing methods over the past few decades, 2) it can be done cheaply, accurately and effectively, and 3) can be done with a surprisingly small staff, especially compared to the invasive administrative bureaucracy that other tax regimes demand (e.g. the IRS). I haven't made a final ruling yet because I want to chase this all the way down the rabbit hole, and hopefully find some really good empirical evidence either way so we get beyond the "my dad can beat up your dad" cycle of philosophical objections. I will say that "It CAN be done" is very different from "It IS being done." Just because someone knows how to do something well doesn't mean most people are actually doing it well, and in fact the evidence suggests that in most places the actual as-practiced state of the art is quite poor.
But, let's save that and other arguments for the follow up. Right now, let's just address what I'll do with my billions.
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If you accept the premise that split land/improvement assessment can be done at all, it stands to reason that it can be done better and worse, and that the state of the art could improve through careful study, practice, and the scientific method.
If we also accept the premise that we can get the state of assessment to the point where it is "good enough", and we have *empirically validated* that it indeed has the predicted good effects Georgist asserts, then we move on to getting the word out about it and seeking to implement it on a wider scale.
Working with an organization like the IAAO, the International Association of Assessment Officers, would be top of my list, as they already have a direct pipeline to all the property value assessors in the USA and Canada and a bunch of other places.
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The key is incrementalism.
So many movements need to pull off a revolution or achieve massive political power before they can get any of their policies implemented, and congress is a massive cluster of gridlock so that ain't ever happening. Just look at the trouble Joe Biden has had trying to pass his latest bills.
BUT! You can implement a partial land value tax in any property tax state RIGHT NOW, just by improving the state of assessment, without changing a single law (well, maybe not in California, what with prop 13, but you could other places). You don't even need to capture statewide office to start doing it. My home state of Texas straight up bans LVT, because you're not allow to do split-rate taxation, and I think you could even do it there.
Here's how:
You already have a hidden split-rate taxation policy based on existing assessments. According to Georgism, the property value is some percent land and some percent improvement, and the status quo taxes the combined value at the same overall rate. If the land is worth more than the improvements, that means the effective rate of tax on land is higher, and vice versa, even if you don't formally acknowledge this in your tax code.
So if you are chronically under-valuing land (as is plainly the case in many states, you just look at what the total property value is assessed for versus what they're actually selling for), and you fix the assessments by just raising the assessed value of the property to match what the market is actually asking for, boom, you've just implemented partial LVT. Before the land was being undertaxed and now it is taxed more in proportion to its value. You don't even really have to change the *rate* of the property tax. And if Georgism is correct, you would expect to see partial, measurable, benefits.
And yes, you need to reform zoning. Georgists are front-line allies in this fight. But even without zoning reform LVT can do its work, because a land's zoning affects its market value, and thus the amount it can command in land rents. But ideally you want to kill stupid zoning ordinances too. That's just a knife fight against the NIMBY's that Georgists simply have to join hands with the YIMBY's on, but from what I can see the tide is starting to break for the YIMBY's.
Okay, so even under hostile tax regimes you can start getting better trained assessors into office who more accurately assess land, and you start getting "partial LVT's" without changing any other formal policy, law, or ordinance.
So how do you get these better trained assessors into office? Either you train them better (through working with the IAAO and reaching existing assessors, or your own local outreach), or you get involved in political campaigns to get new people into office.
Here's the secret:
Nobody pays attention to local elections.
This if the lowest hanging fruit of all time for a movement uniquely able to enact influence through local elections, and Georgism fits the bill to a T.
Property tax assessors get into office in two ways in the USA --
1) by appointment (typically by a county commissioner or suchlike), or
2) by direct election.
I forget the exact figures, but in my local elections recently the commissioner and the tax assessor-collector both ran unopposed (it being a red state). One of them also ran unopposed in their Republican primary, and the other won a 3-way Republican primary by like, a few hundred votes. This is in a county with ~250,000 people and a city with ~100,000. I'm pretty sure a motivated single-issue campaign could start to pick up local offices like these across the country without wasting millions and billions on quixotic races for governor and congress.
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So here's the political plan for Georgism (contingent entirely on it actually being a philosophy that works in practice and is therefore worth implementing):
0. Do the research and establish that it works. If not, stop here.
1. Improve the state of real estate assessment methodology
2. Get all the research out and into the training pipeline for assessors
3. Retrain existing assessors already in office & elect new ones across the country
4. Up-assess chronically underassessed property due to insufficiently valued land
5. Get the word out into regular people's brains (podcasts, tiktok, etc)
6. Leverage all the work done above to finally remove state-level barriers to split rate taxation
7. SHIFT existing property tax burdens entirely onto land and off of improvements
8. Raise taxes on land rents as close to 100% as you can and repeal other taxes proportionately (sales, state income, etc)
Explaining 7) real quick -- in most jurisdictions they don't actually tax property at the same rate every year. Instead they first decide how much money they need to raise for their budget -- say $10 million dollars, and then they look at what all the property is worth based on their assessments -- say $500 million dollars, and THEN they set the tax rate. So that would be 2% to capture $10 mil from $500 mil.
So if you have split assessments, you can raise the same $10 million you were already planning on anyway, but raise it *just* from the land portion of the property base, not from the improvements. This is what it means to "shift" property taxes on to land. Property is now taxed based on the value of the location rather than what's built on it.
Explaining 8) -- Remember, "100% of land rental values" is *NOT* "we'll tax you the full price of the land every year" -- that's insane! Instead it's, "we'll charge you the annual rental value of your land in taxes".
You can do all of the above city by city, county by county, state by state, without once ever touching the federal government, just by using existing property tax regimes. And once you've built up a large widespread political power base, with the empirical research to back you up, and saliency in the popular imagination, and most importantly -- widespread proof that it works, being lived out all around in many localities -- **that's** when you enter the federal domain and try to reform things there.
But!
It all has to be actually be true and actually work in practice before any of that is worth doing, so the first thing to fund is research, particularly honing in on disputed areas. And I also really need to just finish my damn article.
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PS:
Another thing I would LOVE to throw money at to research is the ATCOR theory, the claim that "All Taxes Come Out of Rent." This is where modern Georgists have split opinions. That's because whether or not "Single Tax" is possible (the idea that Land Value Tax is the ONLY TAX you need) hinges entirely on ATCOR being true.
I've done the math and LVT can raise a LOT of revenue, enough to pay for entire sectors of our budget (like defense), but it probably can't pay for anything. Unless ATCOR is true.
ATCOR says that if you say, repeal the income tax, that extra money will flow to landlords in the form of increased rents. So reduce labor/capital taxes, and land values soak it up.
There's another theory (that I've read more about) called the Henry George Theorem (demonstrated by Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz) that says that under certain conditions, money you put into public goods spending gets soaked up by land values.
If ATCOR is actually true in real life, it means that Single-Tax LVT will -- pretty much by definition -- always be able to fund almost any amount of public goods spending. Reduce taxes on income/capital, and land values go up, you tax those at 100% LVT, you spend on public goods, land values go up, you tax that at 100% LVT, you spend some more on public goods, and so on.
If that sounds a bit utopian to you, I wouldn't blame you. ATCOR is a bold claim.
The Henry George theorem on the other hand seems to hold up in my research so far but it's important to know what the boundaries of the "certain conditions" are. And ATCOR I haven't started diving into yet much at all because otherwise I'd never finish my article.
But if ATCOR and a strong version of the HG theorem are both demonstrably, empirically true, the ramifications are HUGE.
I'm currently only like 60% sure that ATCOR holds at the moment, but I would love to see more studies done on it, and this is something I would spend my billions on.
Thanks! I wouldn't have thought of that approach, but yeah, that makes sense.
Some questions:
1. By the "Lars" in your name (and... well, the depth with which you're discussing Georgism here) I'm assuming you're the one who wrote the review of "Progress and Poverty"?
Thanks for that, btw, I always meant to read it (ever since I theorised up the LVT-only thing in my late teens*, only to inevitably discover, as one does, that someone else has thought of it over a century before I was even born), but the way you described the constant repwti, I'm probably happier with just your review.
2. When you finish your article, where might I be able to read it?
3. Could you provide some links for some of those "tax not getting passed on to renters" studies you mentioned? I would love to have the concrete evidence.
Especially here in Germany, were
A: nobody's heard of Georgism and
B: the majority of people rent their homes; this is culturally seen as fine. So the headlines aren't "People can't afford homes anymore and this is horrible because they can't get on the property ladder!" (like The Guardian might write in the UK), but rather "The rent is too damn high!", which... you know.
4. I know it's mainly "400 billions" because that was the jumping-off-point because of desert-city-construction cost;
do you have any ballpark estimate for the actual cost of some (single piece of) reasonably useful research regarding
- your point 0: does it even work?
- land value assessment generally
- the ATCOR point
* Basically, it went like this: I read Atlas Shrugged, like many teenagers/young men went like "Yeah! Why should anyone have any right to value *I* produce! Income or value added taxation is theft!"
[pauses and thinks about the bit where Rand explicitly talks about how when you extract natural resources, they're now your property entirely, which did not make sense to me when reading it]
"Wait a minute! Why should anyone have any kind of rights to any land or natural resources that should not reasonably be held by every other person? Land ownership is theft!"
"Therefore, the only philosophically justified tax is one on resources that humanity shoud hold in common."
I felt quite clever until I immediately found George on the internet.
In local elections, don't homeowners have huge power? And also, aren't homeowners the group that is most disproportionately disadvantaged by a land-value tax? It seems to me that this would be a very hard sort of local election to win.
If it were possible to do a coalition of renters and large building landlords, that would be great, but those two groups are very hard to organize in local elections.
They do, and this is an important piece of push-back. Re-reading it now I do seem to have understated some of the inevitable difficulties; this ain't going to be a cakewalk. Point is, it seems *doable* rather than *impossible* as some assert.
My main thesis is just this is more viable than people realize. Importantly, the push-back from "homevoters" is not going to uniform across the entire country, and as rents continue to rise and the housing crisis gets worse and worse the tide has already started to turn towards YIMBY's, as we're already seeing in some areas. And the fact that Georgism is gaining salience is another sign of this turning tide.
Even the true-blue *New York Times* is starting to run pieces like this:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000007886969/democrats-blue-states-legislation.html
And with China's real estate economy imploding before our eyes, the role land plays in the economy is going to be grabbing a lot more headlines:
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1458500193389711361
In terms of practical tactics, a lot of it comes down to math. Where are the easy pick up elections. Pick those up. Enact the policy. Study the results. Use those results to gain support for the next territory. Rinse and repeat, slowly march through local governments.
Even with the huge "homevoter" dug in opposition, their eyes aren't always focused on the high bang-for-buck commissioner and tax assessor elections. But of course if Georgists start to make games they'll start to push back.
So I'm not saying it's going to be *easy* -- it will be a fight for sure, politics always is, but it's far from impossible. Compare that to trying to get stuff done at the federal level -- where do you even start?
This is basically trying to move the conversation from "It's completely politically infeasible so we can't and shouldn't even try" to "let's craft a battle plan and see what our best angle is, even though it's not going to be a cakewalk."
*make gains arg
Good! I've also been heartened by the substantial YIMBY progress over the past five years or so, even if there still hasn't yet been a huge win, like substantial upzoning around transit stations, or overturning Prop 13. It's slightly worrying that most of the progress has been in blue states, and perhaps even the blue parts of blue states, so that YIMBYism might become seen as a partisan issue, rather than the cross-party divide that we have historically seen.
Commenting purely to say that I really appreciated reading this long post, and appreciate the effort that went into it.
I second that. Fascinating.
Georgism is a kind of stand-in for good governance, what is there not to like? The issue of why is a desert is the real utopian notion. We have billions of people in the world who can't all move to a utopian desert town. The idea of throwing everything away and starting fresh is so early 20th century, old-school modernist.
KidCities.org is a way to evolve into a better functioning place.
https://youtu.be/eX_2vryg2uI?t=5909
It's not new, or, more buildings that will make places with increased civility, it requires more living, more understanding of our interactions.
Model Cities (and the "meta verse" too) make me think of Fredrick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis as well as the great Eagles song, The Last Resort.
I continue to be skeptical that siting a charter city in one of the poorest, most violent countries on Earth is a fantastic idea, sorry for being negative. My impression of Latin America as a whole is that it gets convulsed every decade or so by waves of left-wing populism. Sometimes it swings a little right..... only for leftist populism about wealthy elites to rear its ugly head again. If Prospera's successful is any way, I just don't see how a future Honduran demagogue isn't going to ride a wave of popular envy & frustration at the wealthy, mostly non-native folks. That's without even getting into security issues. Developing countries are perpetually 'developing' for a reason.
I'd put a charter city's odds of success as being much greater within a 1st world country. The Nebraska story (it's from 2018) is really interesting! My take on US politics is that during a future recession, at least 1 of the 50 states would be open to such a thing- especially if it offers some immediate tax revenue, a Thiel-type could pay off the legislature that way. Other options could include a remote outpost of a developed country. Most people aren't aware of how many tiny remote islands or random pieces of land major countries control.... from the British Isle of Man to various American outposts (Virgin Islands, Guam, Samoa, some smaller uninhabited islets) to French Suriname or Polynesia. Australia has a bunch of small islands. I'm sure there's many others I'm not thinking of.
Lots of small island countries in the Caribbean are much more politically stable and capital-friendly. Bermuda, Bahamas, Antigua, Trinidad, Saint Lucia..... you're also within the US sphere of influence, so I doubt the security situation could get too bad.
Another option would be to buy a used cruise ship and use it as a perpetual floating platform. Would certainly be expensive! But comes with the benefits of no national laws whatsoever
It's a relatively wealthy island that's a popular tourist destination for Americans with a population that seems to distance itself from the mainland (it's more anglophone for historical reasons, for example)
The whole selling point of Próspera is that "we can start up here free of local regulations because it's a poor area and the national government will be delighted to give us a free hand in exchange for boosting the economy".
Part of "we don't need no regulations" because they're going to be doing it all their way with their own systems and philosophy is going to involve "and if the locals don't like it, tough, there's no way they can enforce their rules on us".
I've grew up in Central America and: yeah, kinda.
Everyone there has the vague knowledge that they are getting fucked; that they are getting payed .50 cents a day hauling coffee up a hill, and the hacindado is getting $20 a sack for something that magically becomes worth $500 the instant it lands in a white guy's hand.
They remember the shit the US pulled down there in the 60's too, it isn't an academic thing. If you live in half of the continent, you know somebody who knows somebody who's uncle got killed/disappeared by a CIA backed death squad.
This ontop of the rich people in-country not having internalized that you need to hide that shit a little, or the peasants start to get restless.
"They remember the shit the US pulled down there in the 60's too, it isn't an academic thing."
Likely true, and in the case of Honduras, the most recent RW coup took place in 2009, under the auspices of St. Obama and St. HRC.
"If Prospera's successful is any way, I just don't see how a future Honduran demagogue isn't going to ride a wave of popular envy & frustration at the wealthy, mostly non-native folks."
My cynical view on that is if the report is any way accurate, and not slanted because they disapprove of the entire project and want to paint it as hand-rubbing villainy, then Próspera is going about the way I expected it to go in reality.
"In June 2019, Próspera arranged for villagers to elect a new patronato. Monterroso handpicked a slate of candidates, who ran uncontested."
"They've got plans to attract medical and finance (specifically crypto/distributed finance) industries. There's currently a bank going through the "propose your own regulatory code" process."
Not Próspera, but along the same lines:
"Orchid has 400 employees already and the locals are typically doubling their income. They'll start exporting in January 2022. They'll invest $85 million over four years with 2,700 employees eventually. It's the largest greenhouse in Central America, exporting vegetables and flowers, over 160 hectares."
And how they'll pay off the demagogue is the way they're paying off the national government right now: promise to create such wealth that they can operate a slush fund to bribe officials and ministers and ignore or crush local dissent. A smart demagogue will not kill the golden goose, because if the rich foreigners get too squeezed, they can just pack up and leave, and then all you will have is an empty shell and the poor locals who were working for the rich foreigners. Próspera is promising to bring in all these high-tech, high-value, high-earner companies, Orchid is already a going commercial concern. Does the demagogue want to drive them off, or keep skimming from their profits?
"an outcry after Próspera’s armed security guards, responding to a spate of robberies, began asking people coming and going from Crawfish Rock to identify themselves and state their business"
I mean, yeah. What else would you expect? Shifty characters from the locality see a chance to boost valuable construction materials and machinery, theft happens, the private security force has to put a stop to it, the honest locals get inconvenienced, people who have lived there for years and could come and go as they like get really pissed-off about that.
This is why I am also sceptical about "defund the police" initiatives where all problems will be solved by sending in a social worker and a therapist to defuse conflict. Yeah, right. Eventually you need somebody to grab the wrong-doers by the collar and remove them from the site of their wrong-doing, and just asking nicely isn't going to cut it (though I think people can rightfully be angry about a private security firm who are not the police acting as though they are the police).
>grab the wrong-doers by the collar and remove them from the site of their wrong-doing
If the police could be relied on to do that without shooting the wrong-doers dead, there would probably be fewer calls to defund the police or replace them.
"If the police could be relied on to do that without shooting the wrong-doers dead"
What percentage of police interactions end in police killings for unarmed people? There's like 20 or so police killings o unarmed people per year? Our of millions of interactions? And the rate is the lowest it has ever been, right?
The Washington Post's database has 429 unarmed people shot and killed by police in the US since they started recording them in 2015, or 72 per year. If you also include people who were holding toy weapons (248), it rises to 113/year. The rate of police shootings is not very different across any of those 6 years. I don't know where you got "like 20" from.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/
(Also note that even when someone is carrying a weapon that doesn't mean the police were right to shoot them. Such as the case of Philandro Castile, who is recorded as "a black man with a gun" in this database, but he wasn't trying to shoot anyone - he informed the officer that he was carrying a gun and then got shot when he went to take out his wallet.)
Perhaps 61 per year? I don't know when in 2015 they began tracking. Anyway I don't consider 72 per year to be significantly different from 20 per year. Philando Castile is quite a rarity. And keep in mind that unarmed people would include Michael Brown who was trying to grab a police officer's gun and charging towards him, for example. Do you actually disagree with me that the risk of police shooting dead a wrong-doer is very small?
I used to work with a retired police officer. He mentioned how one of the most dangerous assignments he'd ever seen was going after a man on PCP -- which my coworker had to do multiple times. The standing policy was to send at least three cops, but even 3 on 1, there were often casualties (few fatalities, though). The main problem is that the raging PCP addict is essentially immune to pain, so that rubber bullets and Tasers are completely ineffective (as are pain-holds); and yet, you are absolutely prohibited from shooting him. Often, the only way to bring him down is to contain him as best you can (to prevent him from harming bystanders), and wait for the PCP rage to run out.
I'm not sure what a social worker can do in this situation that a police officer cannot.
https://psychedelicstoday.com/2021/08/18/how-pcp-became-a-weapon-of-police-propaganda/
What about throwing a net on him?
Not that cops carry one personally, but in the trunk of the car. (And I know it's easy for outsiders to add "just one more thing" until a police car looks like a clown car, but a net packs up small and completely immobilizes a person, which seems like something cops need to do a lot.)
Literally the first link under "Elsewhere in Model Cities" is the account of a failed attempt on turning a cruise ship into a floating city. Turns out that running and maintaining a cruise ship is monstrously expensive and a regulatory nightmare.
Belize is not "Latin America as a whole", it's Latin America as administered by the British Empire. Well, OK, pirates at first, but *British* pirates, basically working for Queen Elizabeth, and then properly part of the empire for a few centuries. It's not exactly Canada or New Zealand, but it's a distinct culture from the rest of Latin America in more than just language. Probably much closer to the Caribbean island nations you list, but I'd go more Jamaica than Bermuda.
Also, much more central to the US sphere of influence.
It might be cool for Scott to review Boom Town by Sam Anderson. It tells the story of the founding and growth of Oklahoma City. Oklahoma City started as basically a charter city being founded in one day after the Oklahoma land run. https://www.amazon.com/Boom-Town-Fantastical-Basketball-World-class/dp/0804137315/ref=nodl_
I've seen towns and villages founded. Governments incorporated. All that. Not grand visions of social engineering. Just the normal operation of people settling land. Wouldn't it be easier to start on a small scale? Most American colonies started with a few hundred people. So do most new towns. If you want to build a city you need government level resources. But if you want to claim a bunch of land and start your own little utopia you really just need some cheap land a few hundred people. (In the US you can still get free land, by the way.)
It seems to me most of these grand social visions/communes/whatever fail because the people who want to make them lack the actual experience they need. As larius said, if I were a committed Georgist and I had a billion dollars to spend on Georgism this is probably the last thing I'd do. Or maybe they're not really committed to their ideals. They'll move to manifest them but only if it's to another part of Manhattan, effectively.
This also isn't how I'd found any city at all. A lot of times they seem like people who are really good at one thing and think that means they know everything about urban planning or whatever. I note the people founding these cities are almost never real estate professionals, architects, general contractors, whatever. I'm reminded of Bloomberg's comments about how farming is just putting seeds in the ground.
I've generally been pretty tough on Georgism. And I do think Georgism's wrong. But I respect George's theories and the movement's tax lobbying much more than whatever this guy's doing. I think Georgists are wrong on rather technical grounds. I think this guy's got too much money and too little sense. On the other hand, I look forward to another Youtube video about failed utopian communities founded in the American west.
I'm almost done with that follow-up I promised; I'd be pretty interested in knowing what particular technical grounds you had in mind so I can make sure to look into them and address them fully?
Briefly: Georgism is, of course, possible in the sense that the praxis of Georgism is effectively sending agents of the state to extract revenue from landowners. This is not only possible today but is one of the oldest form of taxation. My issue is that Georgism implies that this isn't merely a way to raise revenue but that it has positive economic effects. It effectively says that turning the state into a single, massive landlord would cause benefits beyond the revenues being sent to the common treasury.
Nor is Georgism merely the idea that we could redistribute land or rearraange ownership in a better manner. I believe in land reform myself. It specifically invests itself in the idea that extracting these surpluses will have positive effects, that it's more pareto optimal to tax than not to tax. To put it with maximum bluntness, a Georgist would believe that if you levied a Georgist land tax and then burned the money then this would lead to a more efficient economy. (Not wealthier, since obviously money is getting burned, but more efficient.)
Most modern Georgists are not socialists so they don't run into the original calculation problem. (There were older Georgists who did want to abolish private land ownership. But I think they're mostly gone.) They can value land through transactions. Likewise, while it would require a much greater version of our current land assessment bureaucracy, this is an obstacle to economic efficiency rather than implementation. In other words, assessors might not be able to find the actual value of a property. But this wouldn't stop the state from guessing it and then extracting based on that guess.
Where they run into an actual calculation problem is that their theory implies a disunity. The Georgists understand, as most non-Georgist economists agree, that land taxes at some level extract wealth out of the system and have a dead weight loss in economic activity. Extreme versions of this lead to things like the abandonment of farmland, as in certain Ottoman period. More moderate ones lead to a slowed increase, as in Tokugawa Japan. The Georgist is different from the mainstream in that they assert that taxes below a certain level will not have this effective. They think taxes on the value of land itself, but not on improvements/activity, will not depress improvements/activity. They think it will increase them by leading to a better distribution of land. But Georgists agree taxes above the amount meant to extract the value of the land will decrease economic activity.
This implies you should see a disunion as taxes increase. In other words, if a rental house generates $2,000 in rents and $500 of that is from land then taxing $500 of that (under the Georgist theory) would have no effect on the availability of rental units but taxing $1,000 would. This is where the Georgists run into their calculation problem. Almost no one sells land apart from the improvements. They sell unimproved land but unimproved land is not the same as the land underneath improvements. If you resort to saying the value of the dirt has gone up because a house has gone up then you are absolutely taxing improvements and, even by Georgist standards, should expect a decrease in such activity.
There is no good way to calculate the division of how much of a property's value is land vs improvement. There are few transactions and no way to calculate it. You can create a method that you could apply. But it would be distortionary because it could not be effectively calculated. And if you COULD calculate it, then you still shouldn't be Georgists. You should instead use that calculation to find the highest and best use of the land then allocate it. After all, in that world you have some way of determining the value of any specific hypothetical improvement since you can determine both its building price AND its price effect on the land. Instead, what are proposed are various formulae and dodges like forcing people to sell their property at self-assessment which have their own problems.
None of this gets into the fact that land, being highly inelastic, means that taxes will tend to get passed onto the consumers rather than the producers (ie, renters rather than landlords). You could, of course, keep jacking up the tax. But this will just lead to an arms race. You could just nationalize the land directly but then you're just reinventing socialism. (On this point, in particular, Georgists seem to be outright denying mainstream economic consensus. Everyone else in economics agrees that land has inelastic demand and inelastic goods that are taxed tend to pass the costs onto consumers. But Georgists repeatedly say that landlords can't raise rents despite that being almost the definition of inelastic demand.)
The end state of Georgism is higher property taxes and a larger property tax bureaucracy. We've seen societies like that. Georgism's unwilling to engage in that empirical reality. Georgists are highly allergic to investigating actual land tax regimes for whatever reason. They have never come up with a good defense, as far as I've heard, why every society in history has considered land taxes to be impositions on the poor rather than the land owners. The end of such taxes have almost universally been peasant causes and imposing them has required mass murder and dictatorships. Nor have I seen the economic effects Georgists want to see. We have very good records of how land taxes were levied in Europe and East Asia and the modern world at a variety of rates. I'd expect some empirical evidence.
I further object to Georgism on political grounds. Again, land taxes have generally been a form of control. Independent land ownership has usually been a sign of democratic government where individuals were free from government. The Georgist proposes a massive expansion of government bureaucracy and intrusion into life without seeming to think of the political implications. If we expand the assessors ten fold and the tax court hearings a hundred times then this army of bureaucrats measuring our homes for taxation is on its face undesirable. Not to mention the inherent political unpopularity of such a project means it will tend to crop up (as it did) in more dictatorial regimes.
Thanks for sharing! This helps me understand the roots of your objections. Hopefully my follow up will live up to your expectations.
No problem. Sorry for not being as available as I hoped. If I might pay a compliment, I really do love that Georgism takes land issues seriously and is trying to better that. And while it has its issues it's definitely more anchored to reality and willing to do the work than a lot of ideologies with grand ideas about how to change land tenure. I think it's mistaken but I don't think it's stupid or evil or ignorant. And I think plenty of ideologies ARE that way, especially in regards to land.
I mean either it works or it doesn't, right? No point arguing for centuries about what George "really meant" -- and I think we should have plenty of evidence for everyone to make at least a preliminary judgment once the digging is done.
Oh, and for what it's worth, I'm willing to be convinced if you can make the arguments convincing.
Appreciate that! Same goes for me.
Excellent summary of the ideas and problems there. Thanks for writing that up.
Damn good summery of Georgism. You may have converted me, unfortunately I am still a little confused on a few points. If you or others could explain where I'm miss-informed I’d be much obliged.
I want to know how to view different types of taxes on a spectrum of progressive to regressive. After reading your comment I am afraid I have miss-classified property taxes.
I currently view the situation as thus:
Sails tax is very regressive
Because poorer people spend a higher percentage of their income on things sold in store and thus subject to the tax.
Income tax is largely regressive
Because poor and middle income people make their money by selling labor and rich people make money from owning stuff and renting it out. Though if you graduate the tax brackets as they do in the USA this effect can be partially mitigated.
Capital gains tax is progressive
Because it taxes returns on capital and only the rich have any capital.
Property tax is progressive
Because the rich always have bigger houses and the rate that their houses increase in value exceeds the rate that their incomes from wages increases. It also improves the general efficiency of land usage as it encourages people to move low value usages out of high value areas.
Users fees are probably regressive
But they are fair, I have trouble seeing why people who walk should pay for the roads that I drive on unless the good or service is non-rivalrous which most services are not.
I live in New Hampshire and feel like the system up here is better for the little guys then that down in mass because the housing costs me the same but I know the people with mansions are actually paying for the schools (I was on a town budget committee school is the tail that wags town government budgets ex: 15 million for school 3 million for every other town service)
Capital gains tax is a little more in the middle. In the US many people own stocks, bonds, rental houses, etc. who don't really fit the "rich" range. Particularly as most retirees are drawing off capital gains to make their previous savings large enough to support them when they have no labor income.
So, yea, capital gains generally is more progressive in that it tends to hit the very rich more, it hits lots of savers/investors and the elderly pretty hard.
Property tax is also a little less progressive than it seems on the surface. While the rich have more property (of the large taxable sort, houses, cars, etc.) the proportion of their income spent on housing and cars is not as large as for the poor. So much like sales tax, property tax is sneakily regressive, or at least not terribly progressive.
At some level, all taxes are regressive because taking money from the poor is more painful for them on the margin than taking money from the rich. Getting around it without just saying "Everyone under X dollars of income or Y dollars of net wealth doesn't pay taxes" which itself has all sorts of problems. The best way to mitigate this problem seems to be on the expenditures side, and just spend as little as possible to avoid having to tax to pay for it. Or at least stop taxing to throw money at rich people subsidies.
Apart from the fact that rich people are disproportionately likely to have large capital gains, the capital gains tax rate is *literally* progressive.
Someone making up to 40k doesn't pay any LTCG tax _at all_.
"Progressive" isn't a binary state.
Just want to let you know that I loved your first georgist article and am eagerly awaiting the follow up
Reads to me like a scheme as old as Charles Ponzi: founders sell a brilliant vision that taps into the generic human longing for Utopian on credit, umpty easy equal payments and/or an Underpants Gnome theory of Someone Else paying via sale of Overlooked Valuable Resource X. If the scheme can be sold to enough succeeding levels, then the founders and the first few levels can exit rich, leaving the latecomers rich in experience, if not in actual cash.
But in their defense, this is kind of how a shocking number of Silicon Valley-esque startups operate these days, too. Found Company X with a truly inspiring human-oriented mission statement (no such grubby thing as just earning a honest buck), a glossy website and/or app, build social media buzz, and eventually sell to a greater fool and/or some established firm that is either delusional or cynically wants to suppress you for some usually noncompetitive reason. Everyone who got in on the ground floor exits with a big bag of cash, and the later workers or smal investors get...experience.
You'd expect there to be legitimate opportunities that look like ponzi schemes, in the same way there are wasps that look like hoverflies.
I was a lot more skeptical of pictures like the first one until a week ago, when I saw this link:
https://www.dezeen.com/2020/07/08/shop-architects-and-bvn-design-worlds-tallest-hybrid-timber-tower-for-atlassian-in-sydney/
Up until now I've never seen these solarpunk-bird's-nest-type towers in the wild, only in visualizations. And technically I still haven't, since this one isn't built yet. Still, it's scheduled to be completed by 2025 and a major tech company is paying for it, so presumably it'll actually happen. Also it's partly made of wood, which seems neat. Lore really could afford two or three of them if that's what he wanted to put his money into.
I'd check what the maintainance bill looks like before building one of them.
I hope that artist's impression is not what the reality is intended to be, because it looks so ugly. A bunch of wire flower baskets plopped down amidst Lego constructions, with some 'Blade Runner' type light rail system for that retro-SF future effect, surrounded by scrubby desert shrubs and a line of ant-sized humans walking a road? trail? with no real sense of how far they are from the city towards this random assemblage of buildings under a louring sky.
I think it's meant to be pleasant from inside, since the massive exoskeleton presumably allows you to do away with many of the heavier structural elements that otherwise lie at the core of most big buildings. Of course, the price is you end up looking like your whole lovely natural wood / rooftop garden ecology is behind bars, kind of the ultimate in the gated community look.
About the one in Australia, if the locals don't dub it "the chicken coop" I'll be vastly disappointed 😀
Looking at the 'artist's impressions' with all the greenery on the various floors, those are going to be very labour-intensive to maintain. I'm betting that half the plants are allowed quietly die off or will be replaced by artificial ones a year or two after this thing gets built and opened.
These guys keep looking out in my direction, the American West, I guess because there's a lot of open space here. But one there isn't enough of is water. There isn't really a sustainable supply of water in the West to support the people who are already here.
"Not enough water" is exactly why people weren't building cities in deserts, so unless Telosa can manage to source enough of a reliable supply *and* not bleed it off from the surrounding communities, it is not going to be a runner.
Same problem as with Próspera quoted above, and I don't know if this is reliable reporting or trying to make the guy out a moustache-twirling villain, but this did make me angry:
“Wow,” he said, in a breathy whisper of faux-astonishment, “how terrible, eh? To live in this modern age and lack running water.” He went on: “Running water to your home, such a basic yet transformative and essential service.” A pause for effect. “Who did that?”
Yeah, when I was a young child living out the country in the third quarter of the 20th century, we didn't have running water to our house and we didn't get it until the local farmers started up a group water scheme (because they needed the water for their milking parlours) so I am very well aware of what a boon it is - just turn a tap and here's water! - and I am also very prickly when it comes to people acting like Bond villains over "Kiss my feet for doing this or else go thirsty".
When I read that I couldn't help thinking about how this was over a year and a half and the city hadn't gotten their shit together enough to get water to their citizens. It reminded me of the town I lived near as a kid when their wooden water mains went bad and they started to dig them up to replace them. Then... somehow the money disappeared into mismanagement and corruption, and the town had dug up roads and crap water for years. So when reading about Prospera man saying "Who did that?" I was imagining that in the next fram he turns and looks at the city council and say "You had ONE JOB! Why couldn't you do that?"
This. Prospera stepped in when the city's existing water management failed, so while he is phrasing it like a bit of an arsehole he is IMO right to point out the failures of the previous water supplier
Often I read about water shortages in various parts of the American West. For example, I know of disputes over Colorado River water, rationing in California, water transfers from north to southern California and western to eastern Colorado, and the decline of the Ogallala Aquifer.
However, I have never heard of anyone actually moving away, to a different region, primarily due to these water shortages. It must happen at least occasionally. Is it more common than it seems? Is it at all comparable to the decades of migration *into* the Sun Belt?
Or is water shortage a perennial complaint that often accompanies the revealed preference* of not actually leaving?
If the revealed preference of almost everyone in the American West at present is not actually leaving, despite the water shortages, we should probably be less surprised that 50,000 people might choose to move to Telosa. Especially if there will be minimal farming and minimal water-intensive manufacturing.
* Please tell me if there's a better term than 'revealed preference'.
According to the Telosa website:
>With an ever-increasing drier climate, water is the most precious commodity for Telosa. The city will ensure a diverse and clean water supply by utilizing capture and storage systems as well as blue and green infrastructure into the buildings and public realm.
>Water will be distributed efficiently through smart metering and innovative leak detection approaches. The city will capture and recycle water for multiple uses, minimizing the demand on the regional, natural water sources.
Even if the above can be implemented well, what data will Marc Lore consult to make sure the city is built on land that a) has water and b) comes with rights to use that water?
The FAQ mentions that in addition to the American West, Appalachia is under consideration. Water should be less of a problem there.
No one is leaving the West because of water shortages, the actual users of the water are shielded from the shortages by the state (the same way the air is cleaner in Los Angeles today than it was 45 years ago, without a single resident having to change his or her behavior). At most you might be asked to flush your toilet or water your lawn less frequently. No one is moving out because of that. The problem is people continue to move in.
Water is supposed to be a renewable resource, but there are simply too many people depleting the renewable sources and now it is being mined from aquifers that take thousands of years to replenish. So eventually it will run out.
If you want to secure more of the renewable water, you have to build dams, with horrible consequences for the environment. Nonetheless, people with Save the Dolphins bumper stickers have made it clear if ravaging our watersheds is what it takes so they can live comfortably in Los Angeles or Las Vegas (or farm water-intensive crops), so be it.
The classic discussion (and warning) about the West's water crisis is Cadillac Desert. Everyone living west of the Mississippi should read it:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56140.Cadillac_Desert
I don't understand why Georgism is incompatible with investors earning money. Just because all property wealth goes to the government doesn't mean the government can't then turn around and give money to investors. It's actually extremely common for governments to give tax money to private investors. It's called paying bond interest. You could also sell equity type bonds where you get a set percentage of tax revenue as a dividend. With normal cities, you'd be at the mercy of voters changing the tax rates, but with Georgist taxes, you'd be guaranteed to make a good return if property values soared. I'm saying any of this is a feature of Telosa, or would be a good idea, but I just don't see how there's a contradiction between Georgism and enriching investors.
>. Right now we can’t create big cities at will.
The inefficient and disorganized American economy cannot but the Chinese are managing it very well, they're building cities so quickly that people do not even have time to move in.
Building cities is easy (if expensive) but persuading people to live there is hard. China still has about half a billion impoverished rural farmers who are looking for lives as slightly less impoverished urban factory workers, so they can (eventually) fill cities even if they're quite undesirable in most ways. The US has a much slower rural-to-urban flow going on, and these people are pickier about where they want to live; so much so that the US is having trouble keeping well-established cities like Cleveland and Detroit from losing people.
If you spent a trillion dollars (just one measly stimulus bill!) you could probably build a decent sized city from scratch. And if you offered free housing you might be able to get a bunch of people to live there. But the crowd you'd attract with free housing might not be the kind of crowd you'd want to attract.
Actually, this gives me an idea for how you _could_ start a city from scratch. There was a famous quote about facebook being successful because it helped young people get laid. I think there'd be a way to kick start a new city under similar principles; the housing is subsidised at first but you can only move there if you are aged 18-25 and single, and there's a strict 1-1 ratio of men to women.
Why do governments seem so much more friendly toward charter like city entities (ie don't actively squish them) if there is a cult involved.
Religion seems to give such respectability...
If you're talking about Auroville, it's not so much that it is "getting large subsidies from the Indian government (which apparently has some kind of sentimental attachment to it)"
They got involved because of rows over who should be running it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroville#Legal_status_and_government
"Prior to 1980, the Sri Aurobindo Society, Pondicherry, legally owned all of the city's assets. In 1980, the Government of India passed the Auroville Emergency Provision Act 1980, under which it took over the city's management. The change was initiated when, after Mirra Alfassa's death in 1973, serious fissures in the day-to-day management developed between the Society and the city's residents. The residents appealed to Indira Gandhi, then Prime Minister of India for an intervention. The Society challenged the Government's action in the Supreme Court of India. The final verdict upheld the constitutional validity of the government's action and intervention.
In 1988, after the verdict, a need was felt to make a lasting arrangement for the long term management of Auroville. The city's representatives along with Sh. Kireet Joshi, then Educational Advisor to the Union government, met for consultations with the then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi. Later that year, the Auroville Foundation Act 1988, was passed by the Indian Parliament. The Act stipulated the vesting of all movable and immovable assets of the city in a foundation, known as Auroville Foundation and the creation of a three-tier governing system: the Governing Board; the Residents' Assembly and the Auroville International Advisory Council. The highest authority is the Governing Board selected by the Government of India. It consists of seven prominent Indians in the fields of education, culture, environment and social service. The second authority is the International Advisory Council, whose five members are also selected by the Government. These are chosen from people who have rendered valuable service to humanity in the areas of Auroville's ideals. The Resident's Assembly consists of all official residents of the city.
The Auroville Foundation, headed by a chairman, is an autonomous body under the Ministry of Human Resource Development. The HRD ministry appoints the seven members of the Governing Board and the five members of the International Advisory Council. There is also a Secretary to the Foundation, appointed by the Government of India, who resides and has an office with supporting staff in Auroville. The Foundation currently owns about half of the total land required for the township. The remaining lands are being purchased whenever funds are available."
And presumably also because the guru or founder, Sri Aurobindo, was an Indian nationalist who supported the movement for independence from Britain before turning to spiritual pursuits and was also influential culturally. It's not just "random cult leader".
The Prospera drama sounds like an indictment of the entire concept, regardless of who captured whose water supply. If Prospera was all that it's advertised to be, then all the surrounding communities would be begging to get in. No one would care about water payments, they'd only care about bumping up their place in line; and anti-Prosperan local tycoons would find themselves with zero support.
But that is not what we see (apparently). We see people treating Prospera as an invader at worst, and an alien neighbour at best. Virtually no one wants to join the utopia.
Wouldn't you agree that it's a bit early to judge? I mean, Jamestown didn't look so hot in 1609, but the English colonization of America still turned out pretty good, despite resistance from the locals.
Given the history of American colonization, things look pretty grim for the locals...
I do not believe that Prospera is advertised as being all things to all people, so no, it does not follow that all the surrounding communities would be begging to get in. People have a broad range of desires, no polity will be optimized for meeting all possible desires, so *whatever* sort of city you build, lots of people - most people - will say "I don't want to live there, no matter how badly some other people do".
Prospera seems optimized for meeting the desires of (non-euphemistic) rootless cosmopolitans, and aspires to be a tolerably good neighbor to agrarian native Belizians. It may have failed in the latter goal, but "they aren't all lining up to move here" isn't evidence of that.
Beyond the surface level competence issues, I feel these projects are all lacking any kind of meaningful analysis of why people come to hold the views they do. There's just this ambient assumption that people are born leftist authoritarian or libertarian and the only way to create a society with lots of libertarians is to take a bunch, separate them and let them breed. As if libertarianism or the lack of it is genetic.
My guess is the outcome of these projects, in the unlikely event they were to ever get that far, would be that they'd very rapidly start to have problems with 'infiltration' by people who turn out to be leftists. If you look at the history of Bitcoin, one of the few large scale (supposedly) libertarian communities online, after about 5 years it rapidly degraded into a bad remake of Animal Farm, complete with rampant forum censorship, dictators railing against the demands of what they called "the mob", denunciations of the evils of democracy, self-destructive economic policies and even "violent" (DDoS) attacks on anyone who opposed the inner party. A whole bunch of the people who were most loudly proclaiming their devotion to libertarian ideals turned out to, in fact, be some sort of communists-in-denial. It just wasn't obvious until the turn of events forced them to reveal their true natures. Thus a bunch of Bitcoiners are perhaps the worst possible choice to create a floating libertarian cruise ship utopia. They couldn't even sustain a libertarian subreddit!
There are other examples, perhaps of most relevance being tech firms. Google, Twitter etc were once very libertarian organizations. Over time they were successfully hijacked by the authoritarian left to the point that they now treat their platforms as a sort of hunting ground for wrongthink and heresy.
This is especially true because the tendency towards authoritarian leftism is perhaps strongest amongst people with specialized skills who have been, um, "educated"/indoctrinated by the university system. Life experience can take the edge off it, but young+educated are the sorts of people you would need to set up a new city from scratch and the sort of people most likely to sign up without really understanding what it entails (because they are young so have no attachments).
To truly create a stable libertarian society, buying a boat and trying to secede from the world isn't ever going to work. Even if you assume a sci-fi scenario in which they manage to create a self-sufficient and even large community, it would end with lots of shocked pikachu faces when it was put under pressure of some sort and very suddenly devolved into a dictatorship of whoever was best at bullshitting.
What they need is not a factory for sea pods or waste water treatment. What they need is an educational and ideological factory designed to create Thatchers and Regans, but in volume. They need deep analysis of what creates un-libertarian mindsets so they can teach a new generation of leaders how to resist the arguments or calls for leftism and defend themselves against the inevitable (but bogus) attacks on their character or morality. If you don't have this then no amount of sea-steading will create a libertarian society.
There's a simple explanation: "power corrupts". It's easy to stick to your principles when you're not in charge.
Nicely put. Success draws everybody, so filtering for people with principles is a hell of a task. I'd bet Arizona, Texas and Florida would love to find a good way of pulling that off.
>> What they need is not a factory for sea pods or waste water treatment. What they need is an educational and ideological factory designed to create Thatchers and Regans, but in volume. They need deep analysis of what creates un-libertarian mindsets so they can teach a new generation of leaders how to resist the arguments or calls for leftism and defend themselves against the inevitable (but bogus) attacks on their character or morality. If you don't have this then no amount of sea-steading will create a libertarian society.
Pretty ironic that you bring up Reagan in regard to an article concerning Central America, since he signed off on some of the butchery that took there in the 80's. And there's plenty of leftists out there working productively in the sectors of the future (like tech).
Perhaps we're using different definitions of leftist, but I note that hardly a day goes by without some new story of internal chaos, strife and political extremism inside tech firms - and it's always from the left. That doesn't look like working productively to me. And, it was NOT like that when I worked there. The people who had the power to do things like ban content chose repeatedly not to use it. Employees weren't in a constant state of open revolt against management. It's all very different now.
I believe the crucial yardstick, in terms of economic development, would be something like revenue, or maybe even profit. Maybe the 'chaotic' traits go along with the creative and capable ones. And just looking around at the head honchos @ Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, are any of these conservatives?
And was Damore "from the left"?
Damore was fired specifically because he wasn't on the left, so he seems like a rather bad example for whatever point you're making here (that tech isn't really now dominated by the hard left?).
All the tech firms had their success laid in the libertarian period. Google was genuinely committed to making the world's information "universally accessible" in 2014, and Jack was saying "Twitter stands for freedom of expression, speaking truth to power and empowering dialogue" as late as 2015.
It wasn't until Trump broke the left's brains that you saw this hard swerve towards authoritarianism and crushing free speech. But by that point most tech firms had been in existence for years or, in Google's case, nearly two decades. They were certainly founded and grown to their current stature under very different principles than the ones they now use, a change partly due to people just leaving (google) and partly due to wildly over-the-top employee activism combined with a culture that fetishes headcount and 'diversity' above all else.
>> Damore was fired specifically because he wasn't on the left, so he seems like a rather bad example for whatever point you're making here (that tech isn't really now dominated by the hard left?)
(a) No, he certainly wasn't fired "specifically because he wasn't on the left". He misinterpreted some studies, and made a bunch of dubious claims about gender-based outcomes in his workplace.
(b) This went to your claim on 'chaos' in the workplace being exclusive to leftist progenitors.
>> It wasn't until Trump broke the left's brains that you saw this hard swerve towards authoritarianism and crushing free speech.
Hyperbole. There's plenty of free speech on the social media platforms, and imo they let too much go unchecked, in terms of misinformation and false claims.
>> They were certainly founded and grown to their current stature under very different principles than the ones they now use, a change partly due to people just leaving (google) and partly due to wildly over-the-top employee activism combined with a culture that fetishes headcount and 'diversity' above all else.
I don't think there's any "certainly" to that at all. These firms have probably always had left-leaning work forces, given the universities they prefer to hire from.
"No, he certainly wasn't fired "specifically because he wasn't on the left". He misinterpreted some studies, and made a bunch of dubious claims about gender-based outcomes in his workplace."
Yes ... dubious claims which weren't on the left. What else could it possibly mean to be fired for your beliefs, if not being fired for the things you claim?
If you're acting on your lefty principles *on the job* then pretty much by definition you're subtracting from productivity, not enhancing it. That's in the core mission statement of leftism, you know: the whole point of being a collectivist/socialist is that you think maximum economic productivity is *not* the primary goal, and in fact you believe some economic inefficiency should be encouraged in order to spread the wealth more equally, i.e. we take (by force) from the more productive Peter to help the less productive Paul, on moral or aesthetic grounds, e.g. because we think Peter is rich enough and Paul is unproductive (and poor) through no fault of his own, e.g. because he has a birth defect or suffered some terrible accident. So if redestributing wealth against the wishes of its current owners is *part of your job* then by definition you're not contributing to productivity. You may be achieving some other social goal -- equity, or harmony, or whatever -- but the one thing you're *not* doing is maximizing production.
>> That's in the core mission statement of leftism
There is no core mission statement of leftism. E.g., Not everyone on the left is a marxist. You're kind of doing what Damore did here, painting with the broad brush.
I guess you're trying for an inversion with the rest of the post - inferring that you can't be a REAL leftist and still contribute to a rise in productivity at the same time? No, (again, for example) the idea of socialism is centered around efficiency in production - it's just best achieved with the modes of production in the hands of the state.
Of course there's a core mission statement. There's no point to having and naming a philosophy unless you actually stand for some principle or other. You may not like the way I phrased it, of course, in which case, feel free to suggest some other, but the idea that you can have a philosophy *without* a central guiding principle is illogical.
No, the idea of socialism is most certainly *not* centered around efficiency in production. I mean, not unless you want to argue that human beings are sort of by nature anti-greedy, and always choose the path of lowest economic growth and poor personal reward if they possibly can -- so we need collectivists to force us to be more efficient and get more material rewards. I mean, that's a point of view, but I've never heard anyone seriously propound it, it's kind of strange. Normally the socialist says humans are naturally greedy and love material comfort, and collective action is needed to prevent that from dominating their decisions.
I've never heard any socialist, or socialist adjacent person (someone "on the left" that is) say anything other than that the priority of their philosophy is to put some human value or aesthetic or social justice whatever *above* pure profit, that is, as I said, the idea is to trade some extra increment of economic value achieved for some extra increment of aesthetic or moral good.
To be sure, many of the less thoughtful (or those who think they can scam the gullible) will argue that there *is* such a thing as a free lunch -- that you can get that extra increment of aesthetic or moral good *without* sacrificing anything at all in terms of economic output or average material comfort. I put these folks in the same category are those who believe the Federal budget can be balanced by cutting out "waste" or those who hawk perpetual motion machines, very amusing but not to be taken seriously.
>> There's no point to having and naming a philosophy unless you actually stand for some principle or other.
Leftism is not a philosophy. It's a political category which you might say encompasses a group of philosophies. These do not all share uniform objectives. Communists seek the seizure of the modes of production by the proletariat. Socialists believe that some production should be socialized, but are more prone to favor bureaucratic/technocratic administration. Social democrats (and permutations thereof) want a combination of market economies and generous social safety nets. White bourgeois liberals in the US may be primarily preoccupied with identity politics, while maintaining lesser (than European) welfare policies.
>> You may not like the way I phrased it, of course, in which case, feel free to suggest some other
I didn't like the way you phrased it because (a) it was reductionist and deformative, meant to convey more of an opinion than a definition, (b) wrong, because leftism is not a philosophy (see above)
>> No, the idea of socialism is most certainly *not* centered around efficiency in production.
In its actual historical and experimental forms, it most certainly was/is. The Soviet mechanization of farming, Stalin's 5-year plans, China's public works were all meant to contest Capital's claim to efficiency, by contrasting collectivism (in production) to market competition. Whether or not they achieved it in all or any instances can certainly be debated. But your blanket dismissal is inaccurate.
I would also point out that European socialization of health care insurance is absolutely geared towards greater efficiency - reducing administrative costs, and leveraging scale in negotiating prices.
To be fair, Stalin's industrialization initiative was demonstrably successful; however, it was built upon massive amounts of slave labor, so there might be, shall we say, a few ethical issues involved.
Er...leftism is not *a* philosophy, it's a *collection* of philosophies? OK. Still doesn't vitiate the original point, just throws a lot of chaff around. Either there is some core uniting principle of that collection, something that deserves to be marked off and called "leftism" -- or the label "leftism" is void of meaning. Let me know which you choose, because you can only pick one.
Whether socialist regimes *also* intended to do the best they could economically is entirely beside the point. Any philosophy (particularly a governing philosophy) has numerous subsidiary goals. But the point still stands that the *primary* #1 top-level this before anything goal of socialism is certainly not economic efficiency and maximum economic production. It kind of baffles me that this is even debatable to you -- why even *call* it "socialism" if collective good is *not* your primary goal? Why not just call yourself a "capitalist," hmm? Why make a big fuss of contrasting yourself with those grubby capitalist who only think about making a buck -- if that's *your* primary concern, too?
European socialization of health care costs is certainly not aimed at driving down the average cost, it's designed to ensure that people who cannot afford the average cost still have access. Very different thing. And clearly it cannot reduce administrative costs if *on top of* the ordinary costs of running health care you have to have a vast national bureaucracy that shifts huge amounts of money around and is responsible for ensuring it's spent "fairly" by whatever definition of the word that means. That's as illogical as thinking that if I add fourteen layers of middle management to a factory my administrative costs will go down. Say what? That never happens.
Certainly the average cost of European healthcare is cheaper, but there is reasonable evidence that is because it *does* less -- because its outcomes in the case of serious disease or trauma are worse (European rates of survival of cancer post diagnosis are noticeably poorer than American, as is survival of preterm babies). And because it rations care -- you have only to look up waiting times for diagnoses and procedures to hear an earful about this.
To be sure, reasonable men can differ on the source of a reduction of average health care expense, but it would be tremendously naive to just assume the quality of care, quality of outcomes, and issues such as rationing are identical everywhere, and attribute differences to some hypothetical reduction in administrative overhead.
To be fair though, Progressives claim that a demographically balanced (or "diverse", in their terms) workplace is more economically efficient than one staffed solely by straight white males. They have some studies (of varying quality) to support this. The common proposed mechanism is that a demographically diverse set of people produces a diverse set of viewpoints (given that one's viewpoint is primarily linked to one's demographic category), which enables them to produce many unorthodox solutions to difficult problems.
I don't think that's in contradiction with my original claim. The other guy was basically claiming that with 'leftists' around, you can't have effective planning of communities or productive businesses. I don't buy that, in terms of the present or future.
He was bringing up Thatcher and Reagan, who never really built anything, that I can recall. They were arch-conservatives who came in and gutted existing government programs. Not sure how they came up in this context.
Um, yeah, I was pointing out the same thing. That said though, the Libertarian/Capitalist position (as I understand it) is that it is *impossible* to have an effective centrally planned economy. Obviously, individual businesses can be planned (indeed, they have to be); but centrally planning the entire economy of a large nation is a task that is beyound any entity other than perhaps God (or some sort of Singularity-grade AI, which is the same thing). Thus -- according to this view -- centrally planned economies will always underperform (in the long term) as compared to free markets.
My own personal opinion is that mixed economies tend to perform best. I don't claim to be some sort of an economic genius, I merely observe that the most successful economies in existence today are all mixed. China's productivity tanked to the point of self-destruction when they went the full planning route; it recovered dramatically once they started introducing free-market elements. Stalin industrialized Russia by fiat, but only at the expense of putting about half the country (arguably, all of it !) into slave labor camps; and his achievement did not have a lot of staying power. On the flip side, places with no economic controls whatsoever tend to be known as "failed states", and they aren't fun places to be, either. Meanwhile, Western-style democracies, while far from perfect, appear to be doing reasonably well.
>> but centrally planning the entire economy of a large nation is a task
I think market economies work at the street level, when actual value is being produced. People making goods, pouring beers, etc, and others are paying for them. Pernicious local regulation of non-predatory small business should be avoided.
Some problems arise when you reach a stage where an economy becomes highly financialized and abstract. Like when US capitalism collapsed in '08-09 after the failure of mortgage-backed securities and the subsequent cascade, and had to be propped up by the government. (Covid did the same thing, and the supply line crisis is interesting, in that it seems to be a problem that can't be readily fixed).
In addition, there's currently a pattern of extractive capitalism - big investors buy up companies, hollow them out with layoffs and outsourcing/whatever. Chains come in and drive local businesses out of operation, sucking money out of communities and sending it to shareholders somewhere else. Amazon and platform dominance. It's a big vacuum sucking the money away into fewer and fewer hands.
America has a centrally planned economy. It's just that the center is Wall St.
>> My own personal opinion is that mixed economies tend to perform best.
I roughly agree. But I think societies chained to money will always move through cycles of pleasure and pain. But what are you gonna do?
>deep analysis of what creates un-libertarian mindsets
This sort of thing would of course be good and useful, but it's hilariously out of reach of humanity's current capabilities. When psychology still struggles with the replication crisis on issues as trivial as "is priming even a thing?" developing a robust sociological model which could adequately answer those kinds of questions is about as far from here as the nuclear reactor was from a caveman. Social "sciences" can be called that only aspirationally, yet people often act as if they're already almost as useful as physics.
I am a little more optimistic here. While the modern social sciences are a mess, there has been a lot of work historically on human behavior and tendencies that is valuable. At least as a starting point for someone interested in the project.
Has there? Had any falsifiable theories emerged and stood the test of time? To me, what seems to have happened, then and now, is that talented storytellers cherry-pick some historical records, dubious statistics and folk wisdom and craft from those ingredients whatever narrative pleases them (or their wealthy and powerful patrons).
Falsifiable is not a bar you are likely to clear here. If you are looking for something along the lines of "Do A,B,C...X,Y, and Z and your children will turn into citizens with these characteristics" you will always be disappointed. If you are looking for something along the lines of "These causal factors tend to result in people behaving more like X, most of the time," that is probably a more reachable goal. Getting anything so complicated as human behavior down to the level of physics is grossly over optimistic, but recognizing patterns that lead to other patterns in a robust, predictable way is probably within reason.
Adam Smith, David Hume, Cicero, Grotius, they all made some pretty enduring contributions to understanding what makes humans work.
I'm not saying that narratives are completely worthless, but philosophy isn't science, and I think that the status which the latter earned due to the overwhelming success of its practical applications unduly leaks to the former. Maybe because they're both parts of the enlightenment project, or their purveyors tend to work in the same institutions and carry the same titles (or are sometimes even the same people). But the accuracy and usefulness of insights produced by these activities isn't remotely comparable, probably differs by orders of magnitude, which is prudent to acknowledge.
I think there is a space between philosophy and physics/engineering you are neglecting here. Consider plant and animal breeding. We've been doing it for years, and while we can't get exactly the outcomes we want every time (ignoring modern bioengineering for a moment) we can move in a general direction and know what to avoid. It doesn't work 100%, and sometimes we don't know why exactly, but it works on whole.
Lots of sciences work like this. Chemistry as done industrially is surprisingly hit or miss, for instance. There is just too much going on that can affect the process to get things perfect, but on whole it works.
I suspect that teaching ethics and morality, philosophy all together, to people such that they adopt more libertarian or other values as opposed to others is likewise workable on whole. It might turn out there is a big genetic component, and maybe a big "random stuff we don't know" component, but I would be surprised to find that it is entirely impossible to inculcate a culture within the realms of human nature. I mean, different places have different cultures just by virtue of people growing up there and raising their own kids there, so culture must be transmissible to a fair extent. I would be very surprised to find that, given genetics etc., we couldn't steer that culture one way or the other.
Plato posited a Utopian framework in his dialogue "The Republic" but towards the end of his life he realized it would only work if "virtue" was inculated into its citizens *before* they lived there. Otherwise,they would eventually ruin it. He proposed something called a "Great Prelude" in his "Laws" dialogue that would do exactly that.
The first iteration of a prelude? The Academy.
Arguably, Plato realized the Republic wouldn't work when he wrote it. He starts out saying "Well, I don't think I can tell you how to make the ideal city, but what the hell."
Note: not an exact quote.
Yet he kept working on it and refining it (see "The Laws"), so he must have believed on some level it was worth investigating for real world purposes. And the concept of the Academy did become a thing.
That's the interesting bit I think. It seems possible that he knew Utopia was out of reach, but wanted to keep moving in that direction to see how far it could go, what were good things to do that humans could actually achieve. I don't have a strong feeling either way, other than a suspicion that he thought Utopia was totally possible if humans were willing to go far enough when writing the Republic. Something about Plato always makes me think he believes he sees through the shadows to reality, and so believes he could remake humanity into something better if he just had access to enough power.
"and so believes he could remake humanity into something better if he just had access to enough power."
Which is really the essential tug of war between conservative and progressive philosophies being debated on this post today, no?
Many creation myths seem to depict a utopian society that is falling apart (usually intergenerational infighting among people with godlike powers), and then the world is born. Not enough virtue before handing out godlike powers, Plato would have said.
So maybe you'd need a "world" to grow people up into virtuous beings, a Great Prelude if you will, and only then would you be allowed to live in Utopia. Or Heaven. Or the Metaverse. Or whatever the kids are calling it these days.
Interesting angle. I have always seen creation stories as an explanation for why the world is empirically so nasty when the gods are supposedly so good. Sort of a cosmic apology to solve the problem of evil; you gotta have some evil power the gods stopped, but not completely, some big fall out between gods that wrecked the perfect world, or just humans being dicks, to explain why the world is so hostile to humans. Otherwise the transition from the more ambivalent or outright hostile pantheons towards the virtuous pantheons that rule through love can't happen.
I don't know how much time in the wilderness, as it were, is necessary to get people towards non-utopian-but-merely-low-state-involvement society's requirements for virtue. I am, sadly, suspicious that we are by nature doomed to swing between authoritarian/totalitarianism and anarchy, never able to settle on a stable "Hey this is pretty decent!" level long term. Perhaps without experience in the hellish states of the world we don't have the sense to stop picking at "pretty decent" and leaving it alone.
A few decades ago I spoke with a Brazilian man who was very upset with the telecom liberalization in Brazil (I was visiting Brazil at the time).
According to this gentleman, big private companies were gouging Brazilians and making billions. I asked, innocently enough, "did you pay less before?" and the answer came without any awareness that it may be seen as undermining his previous rant: "Oh no, I didn't have a phone before; in the old system, it was so expensive only rich people could afford it."
Well, there is obviously much to be said on both sides, and we're not getting an unbiased account from anyone. But if the new lot come in with "hey, seeing as how you're stuck for water, we'll share our supply with you" and it is *perceived* as charitable aid but then they find out that there's a price tag attached, and if taps are turned off when the new lot don't get their way - it's fine to say "nobody was doing this before", but if you are going to do it, be upfront about it. Say "we're willing to sell you water but you have to pay for it".
Because whatever the truth of the matter is, the people in Crawfish Rock don't have water when the taps are turned off, and if they're dependent on Próspera, then they are going to be ruled by Próspera, be that de jure or de facto.
I think we should take a look at real new built cities in the desert for a model of what they might be like - hey, just so happens Dubai has a programme of building absurdly grandiose projects to attract tourism and well-heeled investors.
And it runs on what some might describe as slave labour. They need a ton of foreign labour for the construction work, as well as working in service industry jobs, and if you're not a Western ex-pat in a white-collar job, the conditions are not so nice:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Dubai
And that's what I wonder about projects like these. Telosa *sounds* extremely well-intentioned, but good intentions aren't enough. To make it work, frankly, I think you have to select your proposed population so that they're generally all of the same socio-economic class (you can be as racially and sexually and gender diverse within that as you like) so that everyone is starting off from pretty much the same level. That means you'll avoid sorting out into the 'nicer/better' areas of the city and the less nice ones.
But if everyone is an investment banker or IT whiz, who is going to work in the shops and drive the bin collection lorries and so on? Well, while I would love to think the kids of the janitor and the investment banker are all going to go to the same school and be in the same class with the same access to the best teachers and resources, I don't see that happening. Either there will be schools for the (diverse) investment bankers' kids and schools for the (diverse) janitors' kids, or there will be one set of schools for all, the well-heeled parents will go "How nice", and then hire private tutors for their kids outside of school.
So you have (1) the low-level workers living in the city, which is going to lead to that kind of sorting out into neighbourhoods for the better-off and for the lower middle class or (2) letting the shop assistants and cleaners and janitors and so forth come in to work for the day/night shifts from elsewhere and go home after they've done their day's work, but not live in the city proper.
As for Próspera, yeah, I'm dubious. There probably is a local power struggle going on, but whoever controls the water supply is going to control the area. Whatever they say, if Crawfish Rock is depending on Próspera for water, and paying water bills to Próspera, then eventually they will be absorbed into Próspera. As for the rest of it - the promised economic upturn due to an influx of new jobs not turning out that way, as outsiders are getting the contracts? Again, I'm not surprised, because this is usually how such matters turn out. It happened in Ireland, where big projects were announced by government with promise of X many construction jobs while the thing was being built, then turning out that a British or other firm got the contract.
Honestly hearing the state of things in Prospera makes me optimistic they'll *succeed.* It indicates that they're not afraid to get down and dirty to secure their future, and also don't fold at the first public criticism. Which like it or not, is imo a good indicator of success.
On the subject of building utopian cities in the American desert, have you considered looking at the Mormon tradition of city building?
Brigham Young is by far the most prolific American city planner, with hundreds of cities and towns across the western US. The most successful ones have been Salt Lake City (obviously), Mesa AZ, and San Bernadino CA.
> I’m probably biased here, but I trust Devon more than I trust some anti-tech e-zine.
Based on context, I assume that e-zine is Rest of World. But their "3 minutes with" series https://restofworld.org/series/3-minutes-with/ with the pitch "Get to know the people at the forefront of the global tech industry." is basically a channel for tech startups to promote themselves; and their listicles https://restofworld.org/series/lists/ seem clearly aimed at wannabe tech entrepreneurs who want to make it big in, y'know, the rest of the world.
So what gave you the impression they're anti-tech? That they published an article critical of Próspera? That seems like self-serving reasoning: you dismiss the article because you dislike the source because they published the article you want to dismiss. Maybe you shouldn't trust your friend to be a good judge of character either, because he's probably not immune to the same kind of bias.
> their only condition was that the city officially say they wanted it, which sounds like a pretty reasonable demand with the news coverage being what it is.
When you're in a position of power, using that power to try and force a symbolic display of submission might be a very human desire, but actually doing so makes you look like a tyrant who'll do anything for an ego boost. Don't expect it to lead to better news coverage.
If the issue is a possible water monopoly, then the patronato's plan to restore the old water supply would lead to market diversification and retaliating against that isn't reasonable at all. If they cut off Próspera afterwards, it would reveal the patronato's motivations to be unambiguously selfish. (That's also what it sounds like in Devon's telling of the story.)
That isn't to say that the patronato's refusal to submit is reasonable either. If I were in their position, I'd have accepted Próspera's terms, while making clear to the other locals that the ultimatum shows that depending on Próspera's water is too risky, and we should restore the old water supply as soon as possible.
>> When you're in a position of power, using that power to try and force a symbolic display of submission might be a very human desire, but actually doing so makes you look like a tyrant who'll do anything for an ego boost. Don't expect it to lead to better news coverage.
+1 to whole post, though I would add there's a historical element in play as well. Big American Capital, working in concert with the US Government, has inflicted plenty of misery on Central American countries (see United Fruit for starters). They're right to be suspicious. And culturally, I think a lot of us Americans tend to read events like this from a chauvinistic perspective, that springs form intuitive comparison of our more advanced technological society, with theirs. Stepping back, you kind of realize that some technological 'advances' are making our society sicker, and it may not be the case that everyone everywhere wants to buy in to the whole package.
But water is a baseline social good, and it's possible the local leader (Brimen) is grandstanding for potential political game. Though it's also possible Prospera wasn't well enough apprised of the potential for pushback, and the tensions could escalate. Going to be interesting to see how it plays out.
gain* , my kingdom for an edit option here.
they claim to be building open utopias, but is this some weird cover story to create gated communities and keep out the riff raff?
Is China implementing Georgism in its own way? IIRC in China, much like in Singapore, almost all land is owned by the government. What you get when you “buy” a property is a 99 year lease. Interestingly, out past something like 50 years, leasehold property and freehold property sell for the same price.
In the case of China, the vast majority of local government revenue comes from selling these leaseholds. That seems sorta Georgist is a way.
...in a way? Anyway, I thought something like that, much less precise. No need to try any more Georgism outside China.
I want to recommend "Oath of Fealty", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_Fealty_(novel) as a vision of how a 'model' city might work.
"In late October, Cárdenas and Connor received an unsigned letter from the Próspera Foundation, a new name for the charitable organization Monterroso oversees. The foundation had heard that the pair were looking at ways of restoring Crawfish Rock’s old water supply. The letter said that the foundation assumed that meant they no longer wanted to access water from the ZEDE’s well, and was going to cut them off in 30 days’ time."
What set Prospera off was Crawfish Rock just *talking* about setting up its old water system. So Prospera cut off the water, presumably before Crawfish could build its own supply. At this point, if I lived in Crawfish Rock, I would view Prospera as an enemy, and any supply they offered as unreliable.
****
As for why cities form, I assume it's favorable trade conditions. Delany's theory that cities attract people from sexual minorities is at least plausible, and might have political implications.
Eh. You can sorta see it from their point of view. Something like, "We've been giving you free water and you've been badmouthing us as imperialist assholes. That's sucks. We're happy to keep giving you water, but you have to ask nicely." Sure, it's kind of a jerk move, but having someone to whom you're giving charity badmouth you is not a fun experience.
Of course, having someone who is giving you charity rub your face in it is presumably also not fun, so you can see why the locals would tell them to go pound sand.
Except that the inciting event was apparently the possibility of the locals sourcing their own water.
Maybe. Prospera says the town council forced them out.
I don't know if I have mentioned it on these threads before but there are some examples of successful start up cities in the US that might be a model for a place like prospera. I am posting from one right now.
The Woodlands TX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woodlands,_Texas was started by oil investor George Mitchell and has grown from 8000 in 1980 to 100,000 population today. It is still not an official city but instead is run by the Howard Hughes Development corporation.
Just remembered my youth. There was enough place for chaos. For my kids too, I hope. I wouldn't want any of my grandchildren lack that.
I'm not sure I understand. When you say 'chaos,' do you mean at least several hours a day of unstructured time within otherwise fairly orderly physical and social circumstances?
What I like about Auroville is that it seems very bottom-up. It’s likely that Auroville-like foundings happen periodically, with a few becoming empires one day, the rest being absorbed by the mainstream. I was impressed by what the Rajneeshees accomplished in a short time in Oregon (See Netflix).
I don't have much to say other than I do enjoy learning about these. They are fascinating.
If we're talking about planned communities/new cities/cult towns, then what about Ave Maria, Florida?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_Maria,_Florida
https://www.florida-backroads-travel.com/ave-maria-florida.html
Built (inspired and developed by) Tom Monaghan of "Domino's Pizzas", it's built around the Ave Maria university, which Monaghan moved to Florida after he was denied planning permission to extend the college he built in Michigan.
"Ave Maria, Florida is an unincorporated community that was founded in 2005 by Ave Maria Development Company, a partnership consisting of the Barron Collier Companies and the Ave Maria Foundation led by Roman Catholic philanthropist Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza and the leader of Ave Maria University at the time. Monaghan served as chancellor of Ave Maria University until February 2011. The development of the town was made possible when the Florida legislature created the Ave Maria Stewardship Community District, a limited local government whose purpose is to provide community infrastructure, including community development systems, facilities, services, projects, and improvements. In 2015-16, it was ranked the 40th top-selling master planned community in the United States, out of 230 such communities tracked. It earned the "Community of the Year" for seven consecutive years (2015-2021). In 2020 it broke its previous record for new home sales - selling 507 new homes during the year and ranking 38th on the list of Top Master Planned Communities in the USA. In January 2021, 77 new homes were sold in Ave Maria - an all-time monthly sales record for the town. Ave Maria was most recently names in the Top 25 Master-Planned Communities in the USA and is over 450 home sales for the year as of September 1, 2021."
It's conservative, it's Catholic, I have no idea what it's like to live there but it's survived for 16 years and I haven't yet heard any major scandals about it (there have been some ruffled feathers around the university). So it is possible to found a small city/town and get it to work.
"I like Georgism as much as anyone else, but I’m not sure a new city in the desert is the right place to try it. Land in the desert is already really cheap."
I suspect that there may in fact be a reason why you can buy desert for so cheap.
Telosa sounds a lot like Tabula Ra$a from the Zoey Ashe books by Jason Pargin?
A girlfriend of mine in college studied abroad in Auroville. She mentioned the cult-like atmosphere and failed cashless economy, but didn't seem to have any issues with safety. I do remember that their internet was good enough to support Skype calls, and in 2012 at that.
(Aside: I never studied abroad and always thought of it as a kind of indulgent rich-kid thing to do. Of course, going to Auroville pretty much maxes out on the "find yourself" model of study-abroad.)
It is probably just me, but when I read the Telosa's diversity and inclusiveness statements I just assume this is code language for:
"We will use the natural and inevitable diversity in outcomes between people and cultures as an excuse to totally social engineer anything and everything we would like."
This leads me to a hard pass.
> “how terrible, eh? To live in this modern age and lack running water.”
If he actually said this - they need to hire a professional spokesperson and forbid him from ever speaking to the public again