> It was the era of Robert McNamara’s famous quote that “what’s good for GM is good for America.”
Point of order: McNamara didn't say that, and the person who did say that didn't say it either.
The origin of the quote is Charles Wilson, and what he said, when a Senator asked him about potential conflicts of interest between GM and the country, was "I cannot conceive of one because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa."
I'm intrigued by the section about nonprofits exploding in the 1970s and 10% of Americans being employed by nonprofits. Does the book spend any time on the transition between 1900s nonprofit activism and 1970s activism or does anyone in general know what happened in the nonprofit/volunteer world between these two points?
Because this book makes it sound like nonprofit work was dead in the 20s-60s period and then it just explodes under Nader, which does track with other things I've read, and we've all heard about large progressive reform groups in the 1870s-1920s, everything from child labor to Prohibition, but I don't really know how these two periods connect to each other. There are certainly modern nonprofits, from Sierra Club to the Catholic Church that must have been active between these two periods but does anyone have a good explanation or source for how the American nonprofit scene shifted from...kind of a bunch of housewives marching in the streets for temperance to highly elite groups of lawyers suing people?
Want your mind blown? Go on YouTube and watch the documentary on the Kaiser Shipyards. Basically a government contractor with no particular shipbuilding experience constructs five shipyards which crank out ocean-going cargo ships by the hundreds, built mostly by people who had never seen a ship up close. And all the surrounding infrastructure, electricity, housing, hospitals, parking, rail yards, etc..
Amazing to see thousands of people running around like mrówki, building a ship from start to launch in a little over 4 days.
This was really great - both as a persuasive article on a topic of contemporary relevance, and as a bit of a review of the book from which much of this content was extracted.
> Make it easy for individual citizens, or the groups representing them, to sue, and the legal process will handle the rest. It was like Nader and his team had discovered a cheat code to punch way above their weight class. Litigation, said the Environmental Defense Fund, produced results “faster than by lobby, ballot box, or protest.”
I used to work for a nonprofit that did impact litigation, and this was widely recognized as absolutely true. I remember one nonprofit lawyer telling me that "in Congress I'm not on a level playing field because I'm not donating tons of money to campaigns, but in the courts it's just me and the other lawyer, and the judge has to let us both talk and make our cases". (Or something very similar to that.) Litigation is pretty expensive, but you can get very, very strong remedies, in theory sometimes just by making persuasive arguments.
Very well done. Not sure about "The war on terror caused far more death and destruction than Nader’s seatbelt mandates ever prevented". If we had still the same death toll on our roads as in 1970, those would add up to around 500k+ killed in Germany alone (we had 20k roadkills in 1970, 3 k nowadays). During most years of the Vietnam war there were less US-troops killed-in-action then people on US-roads. Of course, "seatbelts" are just one part, and civilian Iraqi victims since 2003 are many (150k +). Wikipedia: "Estimating war-related deaths poses many challenges" - But then, 9/11 would have happened anyway (though not Iraq). - Otoh, other countries got their roads safer without a Nader gang.
This is my favorite review of the series-to-date. Although, when I read "Nader’s philosophy was one of justice by lawsuit.", I did wonder what Njal would have thought.
> Its first leader, displaying the lack of modesty that was characteristic of the era, described the agency’s work by saying, “What God had made one, man was to develop as one.”
The quote itself here went over my head, especially the first half. Is the leader just saying "we're united"?
The second one, with regard to comment periods and how they may favor the industries being regulated (that file more comments), has this to say:
> Collectively, the studies suggest that more comments correlate with more influence. But why? The empirical picture is puzzling because the informational value of comments has nothing to do with their volume. In theory, a single comment from a public-interest group should be at least as persuasive as a deluge of thousands of duplicative comments from industry.
> It doesn’t tend to work like that in practice. Although the courts only require agencies to respond to “vital” comments, agencies can’t reliably predict which comments a judge might someday find vital. Risk-averse agencies therefore have little choice but to respond, often in punitive length and detail, to all the substantive comments they receive. At the same time, the law places no filter on the information that commentators can submit to agencies. Recognizing as much, industry swamps agencies with hundreds of comments containing thousands of pages of unstructured, highly technical information, typically pertaining to regulatory costs.
> Just kidding—when GM’s women invited him back to their apartment, ostensibly to “discuss foreign relations,” he suspected entrapment and declined. But he did later tell a reporter, in one of his rare attempts at humor, that “normally I would have obliged.”
What exactly was the scandal supposed to be here? How were they going to "entrap" him? He wasn't married or anything... I guess extramarital sex was considered scandalous back in 1966?? Huh...
Before even finishing, I just have to jump in and say I'm onboard with hating Ralph Nader, although my personal reason is that my first car was a Chevy Corvair; the vehicle Ralph Nader murdered to become famous. It was a great car and should have become a classic, except for his utter hit job of a book "Unsafe at any speed".
This guy should be paid by all of us. How do we do this? Nader and Government regulation in general is a huge topic, but the reviewer here gives us a wonderfully clear sense of the issues.
The Corvair case was already obsolete. GM first included an antiroll bar in 64, by 65 had gone to full independent rear suspension and created Anerica's only sporty compact. Didn't matter. Perhaps Ralph's most baleful influence was creating the notion that advocacy implies the existence ofreasonable evidence.
The reviewer's mention of the reduction in vehicle fatalities underestimates, I think, the true improvement. Far more cars on the road, creating an exponentially higher probability of collision caribus paribus and being driven more miles. When I consider this generally unreported success I fear I might become an optimist and so banned from public writing.
Another good book on the liberal reaction to the New Deal era is Kim Phillips-Fein's Invisible Hands. Really helpful in understanding how modern neoliberalism, in both right- and left-wing varieties, was built out of the backlash to what was almost but not quite a form of American socialism.
I was hoping someone would review this book. I don't think it would be quite fair to say that the moral of the story is "big government and central planning worked great until rich liberals broke it" but it's not totally crazy either. An important point for me is that the modern regulatory state which libertarians constantly complain about is a replacement for the New Deal order, not an extension of it. Deregulating construction and expanding the public sector can go together. Like, you'd need to get rid of zoning laws if you wanted to build massive amounts of public housing.
I’d like to suggest an updated activist stratagem that has clearly supplanted the Nader Doctrine (as I understand it from the review, “take it to court, present the evidence, discredit the evidence of the other side and get the laws changed based on the newly accepted evidence”.) Firstly, current activists, especially environmental ones, are not interested in using the court to change or overturn laws. They are not interested in evidence-based strategies at all. They do use the courts, but primarily as delaying tactics (”green lawfare”) to prevent approvals for stuff they don’t like (everything to do with modern society) with endless injunctions and appeals, whereby substantive matters are never tested in a courtroom battle, only technical points that will cause maximum delay. In Australia, we have had numerous government-approved projects delayed by 5 or even 10 years (a coal mine) with these tactics.
The modern activists have no intention of letting anything get to an evidence-based court stoush, because they flagrantly and intentionally lie about the evidence to sway the public and nervous governments. The modern objective is to use fear and terror of consequences to influence the executive to do something. In effect it’s a return to the Vietnam War protest model: don’t argue the case or present any evidence, or weigh up competing advantages and disadvantages, get out there and tear the joint up, chanting plenty of short, emotive slogans, until you get what you want.
Climate change activists are notorious in this regard. This is not the place to list all the egregious falsehoods about climate science or climate trends that activists routinely state as truth, so I’ll use one example close to home (Australia).
Occasionally, some region around the globe will have a bad fire season. This is natural. What activists do is ramp up the propaganda and exaggerate the situation tenfold to make it look as though the earth is on fire continuously. In Australia, we had a particularly bad fire season a few years ago, and the shouts of impending doom and need for immediate action on CO2 levels were constant and aggressive. The “evidence” could be sumarised as follows: “Australia is getting drier and drier due to climate change, and therefore fire seasons are getting worse and worse, and CO2 emissions need to be shut down today”. This basic scenario, and many other related ones, is accepted by all major activist groups, corporations, the government, State and Federal, news organisations. If an activists gets up and says “Australia is getting drier and wildfires are getting worse”, almost nobody calls it out. Unfortunately, it’s 100% wrong. Australia is getting significantly wetter, not drier, since WW2 according to our national Bureau of Meteorology. Secondly, the number and area of wildfires globally is reducing, not increasing, according to a NASA satellite survey of the last 20 years (down by 25%, according to them). The same trend applies in Australia, as it does in the US, where similar wildfire hysteria abounds. In fact, to no-ones surprise, the worst period for fires in Australia and the US was the 1930s, by a factor of 5-10.
This tactic works because 99% of people are not scientists and have no way to check the original science or trends. Even if they do, the sheer number of press releases by activist orgs overwhelms any isolated piping chirps about what the actual studies say. Thus changes public policy on matters worth trillions of dollars and decades of lead times.
This isn't the point of the post, but I have to nitpick and point out that that proposed highway (the LOMEX) is sufficiently far south that I don't think it would be generally considered part of the West Village; I don't think the boundaries of that are generally considered to include anywhere south of Houston St. Even if we want to be really expansive, I don't see how one could reasonably extend it south of, say, Spring St.
I asked the other party here, who's been involved with the environmental movement in a hostile state for 5 decades, for his take: "A lot of what he says about Nader is true. But the era of nonprofits effectively obstructing government with lawsuits is long, long past. In the post GW Bush and Obama years, it's the government that obstructs itself, and everything else."
1. Question for people who use the term "progressive" unironically: do you actually believe that people of other political persuasions are opposed to progress, or just that their view of what progress entails and that the policies required to achieve it are different?
2. Crediting advancements in car safety to American policy seems like a piece of typically American "other countries don't exist"-ism. Plenty of other countries in the world, all (among the first world at least) of which were advancing their safety regulations at the same time. And US auto manufacturers certainly don't seem to have been leading the world in safety technology, that was the Swedes and the Germans.
Good review. Didn't meander, easy to read prose, provided an overview of the book and a Scott-like overview of the book the reviewer thinks the book should have been.
I wish the reviewer had elaborated more on the (vague) theory of "building" transitioning from grass-roots, to centralized government, to being obstructed by the grass-roots. Also more about Alinsky-style activism and how that manifested differently in Nader and Obama (partly, I'd guess that Obama was deliberately using it as an approved way for an outsider to get involved in local politics). And more on the whole "attacking your friend" thing, which I think we see a lot of on the left and the right these days. But perhaps that's a mark of a good review - it does one thing well, but dangles other interesting threads which leave you hungry for more. (Like a moth, presumably, but I didn't realize that the mixed metaphor led there until I was writing this parenthetical.)
WRT Nader and 2000, Gore won a plurality of votes in Florida. Not "would have won on second preferences in a different electoral system", I mean "actually won more votes than Bush"
It should also be worth noting that no state governmennt responded to Nader playing "spoiler" through some kind of electoral reform that would make similar events impossible or even more unlikely in the future; one gets the sense Democrats are more interested in scaring people with the threat of Republicans than in majority rule.
Regarding footnote 12, this only seems crazy with an exclamation mark until you realize that this event was much closer to the Harlan County War than it was to today.
It is always very frightening how easily forgotten the horrifying bloodshed across history of fighting for worker's rights has become. Until way into the 1930s, it was basically standard practice for police and military forces to get involved with machineguns pointed at their very own citizens when a worker's strike turned out to be too inconvenient for somebody.
Thanks for this - The origins of Professional "Nimbyism" and so the immense costs of getting anything new done - including housing - and the ability of tiny groups to hold back useful projects that might help millions of people
It feels like a problem that will have to be solved from within the government this time. I also wonder how Nader would proceed in a society where the judiciary is dysfunctional.
But Nader stood by his book, claiming the study was flawed. All I can add is:
"It takes a strong sense of personal worth to claim to be right when all others say you are wrong. Unfortunately possessing that sense does not correlate with actually being right."
I don't think anyone who actually has lived in San Francisco should be agreeing that building new buildings in SF is impossible. The SoMa area saw something more than a dozen 40+ story buildings put in from 2005 to 2017 including the Salesforce Tower, 2 Infinity towers, the 2-Avery/500 Folsom towers, Rincon Hill, 3-3xx Fremont towers, the Lumina tower, the Jasper, the Four Seasons on Mission next to (and joined) with the old Yelp building, the Harrison, the office building north of the now closed temporary Transbay terminal, the (apparently low cost housing) building west of the same, the building west of that, the Mira, the Salesforce East building and probably a few more.. As I have lived in this area the entire time, I witnessed this firsthand.
Yes, these were decade minus time scale projects, but comparison with the Empire State Building's history is highly unrealistic. Among the problems: 1930 was literally the year after the Crash of 1929 and the beginning of the Great Depression; it was an America still at the cusp of its Industrial Age might - starting to decline in the GFC 1.0 (2008 was GFC 2.0) only to be turbocharged by World War 2, but still the financial capital of the world's greatest manufacturing nation at that time.
This delayed the project but I'm not sure how much. It was certainly months as there was a fuss over how to extract and preserve it.
In any case, I do find it astoundingly ironic that Nader is now being criticized as the spiritual founder of the NIMBY/YIMBY movement - if what I scanned from the book review is accurate.
I really enjoyed this one! It moved quickly and was informative about a topic that I wouldn’t have looked into myself.
In a bit of an odd twist I want to offer some critical feedback because I enjoyed this one so much. Of course the whole “man in the arena” principles applies - you’re a better writer than me - but hopefully this is valuable. I’m on mobile, so please excuse any typos.
Your structure is pretty stellar. Your sentences within a paragraph are well ordered. They move the reader from one idea to next in a way that feels low friction. Your paragraphs are well ordered too. It felt like ideas built upon each other in a way that was intuitive and facilitated understanding.
Something about your sentences feels like it’s not quite there. This “not quite there” feels like the only thing standing between “I really enjoyed this essay” and “Oh shit, this person is a stellar writer”.
I don’t have a great sense of it, but my general feeling was that there were a whole lot of commas. This is less a “write short, boring sentences like that one author” thing and more a “maybe there are a whole bunch of clauses, and it’s hard ordering those effectively” thing?
I think this was partially driven by the tone. The playful and familiar tone was nice, but it also felt unrefined and possibly a bit heavy handed in its application. Scott manages to play with this tone really well. I can’t pin down the difference off the top of my head though.
And I’m terrible at conclusions, so I should be the last person to judge here, but it felt like a tonal shift that was inconsistent with the rest of the review. You came on with a strong conclusion, obviously in contrast to the author’s weak stances, but it was light on context that would have made it more coherent. Many of the references to the election cycle could have stood an extra sentence. It felt like you lost track of the audience and started writing for somebody else.
I imagine you’re sick of the essay by now - you clearly put a lot of time and effort into it already - but I bet you’d get a lot of revisiting it in a few months and giving it an edit. It feels like you’re just on the precipice of being a really great writer, and that might be enough to tip you over the edge.
An outstanding review. Well written. One question:
"Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would later become a powerful senator and the namesake for a disappointing train station". Can anybody enlighten me about this quote? As one who has traveled through Penn Station and now Moynihan quite often, the new station is orders of magnitude better than what it replaced.
It would be a strong and nuanced review, if not for jarring simplistic partisanship. When every elected Republican is an unmitigated disaster, it's unsurprising that eventually you get "populist demagogues". It's not like "progressives" ever saw the difference!
It seems really hard to distinguish between A) the world where excessive litigation led to government stasis, and B) the world where government stasis led to excessive litigation. From this analysis, Nader seems to get a lot of credit for being the one to notice that the courts offered better recourse than legislative bodies did, but that would also be true in a world where secular declines in congressional function made legislation a less and less attractive option relative to litigation, and the world was just waiting for somebody like Nader to popularize the method.
Like, this is also the era when we saw a similar hand-off from congress to the courts in lots of other domains too. For example, this is about the same time that amending the constitution got so difficult that most people don't even bother counting it as an option any more. And in culture wars, the Civil Rights Act of the early 1960s was passed through congress; Obergefell vs Hodges of the 2010s was a court case. Etcetera. In that kind of world, wouldn't your default expectation be some kind of Nader-like figure initiating an era of litigious nonprofits?
It's odd how this review managed to make the subject boring. It should be very interesting to see how regulatory capture happened, and yet the moment it mentioned the New Deal, part of my brain went "I already *know* this" and switched off.
So I'm sorry but I couldn't make it through this one.
> Having learned nothing from the Reagan years, he once again inaccurately predicted that a Bush victory would actually be better for the country, because it would fire up the progressive movement.
I think a point could be made that eight years of GWB were essential for the incubation of the woke movement.
> Nader tipped the election to Bush, who did such a bad job that even his own party completely repudiated his legacy.
{{citation needed}}
This is obviously culture war territory, but in the reality branch I am in GWB was actually reelected. The military industrial complex and big oil also did fine under him. If the GOP disowned every former president with a history of military interventionism then GWB should have plenty of company.
IMHO, Bush was terrible for human rights (while I am sure that plenty of presidents were willing to allow torture to happen during the cold war, at least none of them made it official state policy), the countries he invaded and US long term security interests, to mention just a few things. Last time I checked, the GOP has not even 'completely repudiated' Florida Man after he encouraged his followers to storm the Capitol.
Second, I feel the idea that Nader is somehow morally responsible for GWB laughable. A causal link does not imply moral responsibility, if we go by that, then his kindergarden teacher is just as responsible for not killing him in infancy (and thus preventing his presidency). Moral responsibility for the deeds of any president lies with that president, his party and cronies, his voters and the congress persons who voted for his laws (e.g. the Iraq Resolution).
Casting Bush v Gore as an end-bringer fight in which everyone is supposed to disregard their differences and work together to defeat the common foe is badly misstating things. GWB did not exactly run on a platform of waterboarding and bombing foreigners in 2001.
If someone offers you a deal which is more advantageous than no deal, but also unfair, game theory (or at least EY) advises to accept only with a certain probability, so that the expected gain by the other party is no higher than if they offered you a fair deal in the first place. If Gore told Nader: "Endorse me because I am more aligned with you than Bush is", Nader might rationally chose to defect instead. Or he was just an egoistical asshole, I dunno, he was mostly before my time.
best part of this from an optics standpoint is how the writer contextualizes for the reader how impressive his own review is. he doesn’t just spice things up for you, he makes sure you give him the credit and not the source material.
As a Californian, the Nader-related environmental revolution that kicked into gear about 1969 strikes me as covertly conservative.
Basically, everybody in California thinks the place was best the day they moved to it and it's been all downhill ever since. So, for 50 years, the government has been avoiding do things that would encourage change in California.
Back in the Governor Pat Brown Era (1959-1967), the state government built giant things (dams, college campuses) to attract more people to move to California. But by the first Governor Jerry Brown Era (1975-1983), the "Era of Limits," the state government impeded doing big things that would encourage more people to live in California.
The author of this appears to have forgotten that there is a difference between “the government can do things” and “private citizens can do things.” He therefore starts by saying “the reason houses cannot be built [by private citizens] is because of Nadar,” and then continues to explain how Nadar set a precedent of people being able to sue to stop the government from doing things. He appears to have entirely skipped the step where a given individual or company building an apartment complex on his or its own property became considered equivalent to government action, which would be necessary for his first claim to follow from his second. In general, the author gives the impression of being not just a liberal but a liberal suffering from severe typical mind fallacy, perhaps intellectually understanding that non-liberals exist but not intuitively understanding it; I would like to point out to him that the beliefs “private citizens should be able to build things on their own property” and “government bureaus should not be able to arbitrarily grab land and develop it as they like” are not only compatible but explicitly both held by a very large number of people. I apologize if the author is already aware of this, but if so it did not come through in this essay. The result was perplexing to put it mildly.
Nader’s most lasting impact, it seems to me, was demolishing the American WASP order that had allowed government business to get done with handshakes. I suppose it always had to end eventually, but he replaced a system that functioned on a certain gentlemanly trust with a system based entirely on mistrust overnight. Nobody was really ready for that.
It’s funny, right at the point in this review where it says “ what if one guy was responsible for starting all of this?” I thought for a few seconds and came up with “seat belt laws and catalytic converters - Nader.” it was extremely surprising to scroll down just a bit more and see...yep, him.
Growing up as a would-be third generation nuclear engineer, in a family that spends a lot of time together rebuilding classic cars and debating automaker lore, I heard plenty about the effects of Nader when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s. Both in specifics (suing various parts of the government into tighter and tighter bureaucracy) and general trends (the post-war transformation of American society into a litigation-centric civil culture).
> I’m still not sure why this was the kind of thing someone would study in law school.
The "double-injury theory" is a basis on which the hurt person can sue the automobile manufacturer because the interior of the auto isn't safe enough in an accident.
> Okay, this is a slightly unfair dig at Moynihan, who was genuinely concerned with the plight of African-Americans, even if his analysis of its causes seems retrograde today.
Certainly there are cultural elements to poverty. In "The Autobiography of Malcolm X", he doesn't use this description, but he does mention instances where the Nation of Islam did training to convert lower-class blacks into middle-class blacks by instilling a lot of boringly middle-class behaviors in place of lower-class behaviors that middle-class people would condemn.
Great stuff. I wonder how much this dynamic (we started suing the government, and it was great, but now everyone does it, and we need to find a new paradigm) falls into the category of unintended consequences and how much it's a kind of dialectic, where each wave of reform necessarily needs to be followed by an antithesis. By the way, I think the dialectic is perhaps the single most underrated philosophical concept right now.
This reminds me of when I was on the board of a PIRG in the 90s and was personally widely respected, but
A) the board just did whatever the ED wasn't, which was super lame and made being on the board seem pointless.
And B) Energy policy was a huge issue in our state and with our lobbying at the time, and our position as an advocate for students/the environment was "Only carbon free AND No hydro/nuclear", which made us seem like a bunch of idealistic idiots and so no one at the capitol listened to us. I lost the vote on the board even discussing nuclear as an option 17-3 because the ED was against it. And in the aftermath it was clear board members even mostly agreed with me...so stupid. And of course we got trounced in the legislature and there was more electrical deregulation.
Overall good piece. I would have a few quibbles.
>and they were pretty much all men
What is the purpose of a comment like this? Is there some confusion about the sex of decision makers in 1930s/40s America? Just seems needlessly politicizing since there doesn't seem to be a broader point.
>Think about how fucked up New York would be if this had actually gotten built
It seems to me like NYC in general and even Manhattan would be 99.9% the same. This looks like it would have had a big impact on about twenty blocks of lower Manhattan. So?
"Among the many projects blocked or delayed by lawsuit activism—or the excessive legal review designed to preempt it—are [...] the millions of new homes around the country we should be building but aren’t."
What are the lawsuits preventing new housing? Isn't the housing shortage caused by NIMBY homeowners voting for NIMBY city politicians?
> It was the era of Robert McNamara’s famous quote that “what’s good for GM is good for America.”
Point of order: McNamara didn't say that, and the person who did say that didn't say it either.
The origin of the quote is Charles Wilson, and what he said, when a Senator asked him about potential conflicts of interest between GM and the country, was "I cannot conceive of one because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa."
How do businesses use the FOIA to increase profits?
thought i was reading a noahpinion piece until i got to the bottom, good job!
I'm intrigued by the section about nonprofits exploding in the 1970s and 10% of Americans being employed by nonprofits. Does the book spend any time on the transition between 1900s nonprofit activism and 1970s activism or does anyone in general know what happened in the nonprofit/volunteer world between these two points?
Because this book makes it sound like nonprofit work was dead in the 20s-60s period and then it just explodes under Nader, which does track with other things I've read, and we've all heard about large progressive reform groups in the 1870s-1920s, everything from child labor to Prohibition, but I don't really know how these two periods connect to each other. There are certainly modern nonprofits, from Sierra Club to the Catholic Church that must have been active between these two periods but does anyone have a good explanation or source for how the American nonprofit scene shifted from...kind of a bunch of housewives marching in the streets for temperance to highly elite groups of lawyers suing people?
You write well.
Want your mind blown? Go on YouTube and watch the documentary on the Kaiser Shipyards. Basically a government contractor with no particular shipbuilding experience constructs five shipyards which crank out ocean-going cargo ships by the hundreds, built mostly by people who had never seen a ship up close. And all the surrounding infrastructure, electricity, housing, hospitals, parking, rail yards, etc..
Amazing to see thousands of people running around like mrówki, building a ship from start to launch in a little over 4 days.
This was really great - both as a persuasive article on a topic of contemporary relevance, and as a bit of a review of the book from which much of this content was extracted.
> Make it easy for individual citizens, or the groups representing them, to sue, and the legal process will handle the rest. It was like Nader and his team had discovered a cheat code to punch way above their weight class. Litigation, said the Environmental Defense Fund, produced results “faster than by lobby, ballot box, or protest.”
I used to work for a nonprofit that did impact litigation, and this was widely recognized as absolutely true. I remember one nonprofit lawyer telling me that "in Congress I'm not on a level playing field because I'm not donating tons of money to campaigns, but in the courts it's just me and the other lawyer, and the judge has to let us both talk and make our cases". (Or something very similar to that.) Litigation is pretty expensive, but you can get very, very strong remedies, in theory sometimes just by making persuasive arguments.
Very well done. Not sure about "The war on terror caused far more death and destruction than Nader’s seatbelt mandates ever prevented". If we had still the same death toll on our roads as in 1970, those would add up to around 500k+ killed in Germany alone (we had 20k roadkills in 1970, 3 k nowadays). During most years of the Vietnam war there were less US-troops killed-in-action then people on US-roads. Of course, "seatbelts" are just one part, and civilian Iraqi victims since 2003 are many (150k +). Wikipedia: "Estimating war-related deaths poses many challenges" - But then, 9/11 would have happened anyway (though not Iraq). - Otoh, other countries got their roads safer without a Nader gang.
Very interesting, I wonder how citizens from authoritarian countries exploit in similar ways
This is my favorite review of the series-to-date. Although, when I read "Nader’s philosophy was one of justice by lawsuit.", I did wonder what Njal would have thought.
> Its first leader, displaying the lack of modesty that was characteristic of the era, described the agency’s work by saying, “What God had made one, man was to develop as one.”
The quote itself here went over my head, especially the first half. Is the leader just saying "we're united"?
Coincidentally, I just today read these two articles (https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/, https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-procedure-fetish/) with some interesting further detail on how proceduralism has gone wrong at government agencies.
The second one, with regard to comment periods and how they may favor the industries being regulated (that file more comments), has this to say:
> Collectively, the studies suggest that more comments correlate with more influence. But why? The empirical picture is puzzling because the informational value of comments has nothing to do with their volume. In theory, a single comment from a public-interest group should be at least as persuasive as a deluge of thousands of duplicative comments from industry.
> It doesn’t tend to work like that in practice. Although the courts only require agencies to respond to “vital” comments, agencies can’t reliably predict which comments a judge might someday find vital. Risk-averse agencies therefore have little choice but to respond, often in punitive length and detail, to all the substantive comments they receive. At the same time, the law places no filter on the information that commentators can submit to agencies. Recognizing as much, industry swamps agencies with hundreds of comments containing thousands of pages of unstructured, highly technical information, typically pertaining to regulatory costs.
> Just kidding—when GM’s women invited him back to their apartment, ostensibly to “discuss foreign relations,” he suspected entrapment and declined. But he did later tell a reporter, in one of his rare attempts at humor, that “normally I would have obliged.”
What exactly was the scandal supposed to be here? How were they going to "entrap" him? He wasn't married or anything... I guess extramarital sex was considered scandalous back in 1966?? Huh...
Before even finishing, I just have to jump in and say I'm onboard with hating Ralph Nader, although my personal reason is that my first car was a Chevy Corvair; the vehicle Ralph Nader murdered to become famous. It was a great car and should have become a classic, except for his utter hit job of a book "Unsafe at any speed".
This guy should be paid by all of us. How do we do this? Nader and Government regulation in general is a huge topic, but the reviewer here gives us a wonderfully clear sense of the issues.
The Corvair case was already obsolete. GM first included an antiroll bar in 64, by 65 had gone to full independent rear suspension and created Anerica's only sporty compact. Didn't matter. Perhaps Ralph's most baleful influence was creating the notion that advocacy implies the existence ofreasonable evidence.
The reviewer's mention of the reduction in vehicle fatalities underestimates, I think, the true improvement. Far more cars on the road, creating an exponentially higher probability of collision caribus paribus and being driven more miles. When I consider this generally unreported success I fear I might become an optimist and so banned from public writing.
Another good book on the liberal reaction to the New Deal era is Kim Phillips-Fein's Invisible Hands. Really helpful in understanding how modern neoliberalism, in both right- and left-wing varieties, was built out of the backlash to what was almost but not quite a form of American socialism.
I was hoping someone would review this book. I don't think it would be quite fair to say that the moral of the story is "big government and central planning worked great until rich liberals broke it" but it's not totally crazy either. An important point for me is that the modern regulatory state which libertarians constantly complain about is a replacement for the New Deal order, not an extension of it. Deregulating construction and expanding the public sector can go together. Like, you'd need to get rid of zoning laws if you wanted to build massive amounts of public housing.
A very well written review. And at last, a reviewer paying attention to his word count. Really glad for the Pullman Car joke footnote!
I do have trouble contemplating how NYC would look today with that highway running through it.
I’d like to suggest an updated activist stratagem that has clearly supplanted the Nader Doctrine (as I understand it from the review, “take it to court, present the evidence, discredit the evidence of the other side and get the laws changed based on the newly accepted evidence”.) Firstly, current activists, especially environmental ones, are not interested in using the court to change or overturn laws. They are not interested in evidence-based strategies at all. They do use the courts, but primarily as delaying tactics (”green lawfare”) to prevent approvals for stuff they don’t like (everything to do with modern society) with endless injunctions and appeals, whereby substantive matters are never tested in a courtroom battle, only technical points that will cause maximum delay. In Australia, we have had numerous government-approved projects delayed by 5 or even 10 years (a coal mine) with these tactics.
The modern activists have no intention of letting anything get to an evidence-based court stoush, because they flagrantly and intentionally lie about the evidence to sway the public and nervous governments. The modern objective is to use fear and terror of consequences to influence the executive to do something. In effect it’s a return to the Vietnam War protest model: don’t argue the case or present any evidence, or weigh up competing advantages and disadvantages, get out there and tear the joint up, chanting plenty of short, emotive slogans, until you get what you want.
Climate change activists are notorious in this regard. This is not the place to list all the egregious falsehoods about climate science or climate trends that activists routinely state as truth, so I’ll use one example close to home (Australia).
Occasionally, some region around the globe will have a bad fire season. This is natural. What activists do is ramp up the propaganda and exaggerate the situation tenfold to make it look as though the earth is on fire continuously. In Australia, we had a particularly bad fire season a few years ago, and the shouts of impending doom and need for immediate action on CO2 levels were constant and aggressive. The “evidence” could be sumarised as follows: “Australia is getting drier and drier due to climate change, and therefore fire seasons are getting worse and worse, and CO2 emissions need to be shut down today”. This basic scenario, and many other related ones, is accepted by all major activist groups, corporations, the government, State and Federal, news organisations. If an activists gets up and says “Australia is getting drier and wildfires are getting worse”, almost nobody calls it out. Unfortunately, it’s 100% wrong. Australia is getting significantly wetter, not drier, since WW2 according to our national Bureau of Meteorology. Secondly, the number and area of wildfires globally is reducing, not increasing, according to a NASA satellite survey of the last 20 years (down by 25%, according to them). The same trend applies in Australia, as it does in the US, where similar wildfire hysteria abounds. In fact, to no-ones surprise, the worst period for fires in Australia and the US was the 1930s, by a factor of 5-10.
This tactic works because 99% of people are not scientists and have no way to check the original science or trends. Even if they do, the sheer number of press releases by activist orgs overwhelms any isolated piping chirps about what the actual studies say. Thus changes public policy on matters worth trillions of dollars and decades of lead times.
This isn't the point of the post, but I have to nitpick and point out that that proposed highway (the LOMEX) is sufficiently far south that I don't think it would be generally considered part of the West Village; I don't think the boundaries of that are generally considered to include anywhere south of Houston St. Even if we want to be really expansive, I don't see how one could reasonably extend it south of, say, Spring St.
I asked the other party here, who's been involved with the environmental movement in a hostile state for 5 decades, for his take: "A lot of what he says about Nader is true. But the era of nonprofits effectively obstructing government with lawsuits is long, long past. In the post GW Bush and Obama years, it's the government that obstructs itself, and everything else."
1. Question for people who use the term "progressive" unironically: do you actually believe that people of other political persuasions are opposed to progress, or just that their view of what progress entails and that the policies required to achieve it are different?
2. Crediting advancements in car safety to American policy seems like a piece of typically American "other countries don't exist"-ism. Plenty of other countries in the world, all (among the first world at least) of which were advancing their safety regulations at the same time. And US auto manufacturers certainly don't seem to have been leading the world in safety technology, that was the Swedes and the Germans.
Good review. Didn't meander, easy to read prose, provided an overview of the book and a Scott-like overview of the book the reviewer thinks the book should have been.
I wish the reviewer had elaborated more on the (vague) theory of "building" transitioning from grass-roots, to centralized government, to being obstructed by the grass-roots. Also more about Alinsky-style activism and how that manifested differently in Nader and Obama (partly, I'd guess that Obama was deliberately using it as an approved way for an outsider to get involved in local politics). And more on the whole "attacking your friend" thing, which I think we see a lot of on the left and the right these days. But perhaps that's a mark of a good review - it does one thing well, but dangles other interesting threads which leave you hungry for more. (Like a moth, presumably, but I didn't realize that the mixed metaphor led there until I was writing this parenthetical.)
WRT Nader and 2000, Gore won a plurality of votes in Florida. Not "would have won on second preferences in a different electoral system", I mean "actually won more votes than Bush"
It should also be worth noting that no state governmennt responded to Nader playing "spoiler" through some kind of electoral reform that would make similar events impossible or even more unlikely in the future; one gets the sense Democrats are more interested in scaring people with the threat of Republicans than in majority rule.
t. left-wing third party voter
Regarding footnote 12, this only seems crazy with an exclamation mark until you realize that this event was much closer to the Harlan County War than it was to today.
It is always very frightening how easily forgotten the horrifying bloodshed across history of fighting for worker's rights has become. Until way into the 1930s, it was basically standard practice for police and military forces to get involved with machineguns pointed at their very own citizens when a worker's strike turned out to be too inconvenient for somebody.
Thanks for this - The origins of Professional "Nimbyism" and so the immense costs of getting anything new done - including housing - and the ability of tiny groups to hold back useful projects that might help millions of people
It feels like a problem that will have to be solved from within the government this time. I also wonder how Nader would proceed in a society where the judiciary is dysfunctional.
A Federal study of Corvair accidents showed the car to be as safe as any other sold at the time:
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/20/federal-study-refutes-naders-corvair-charges-july-20-1972-240609
But Nader stood by his book, claiming the study was flawed. All I can add is:
"It takes a strong sense of personal worth to claim to be right when all others say you are wrong. Unfortunately possessing that sense does not correlate with actually being right."
Re: Buildings in San Francisco
I don't think anyone who actually has lived in San Francisco should be agreeing that building new buildings in SF is impossible. The SoMa area saw something more than a dozen 40+ story buildings put in from 2005 to 2017 including the Salesforce Tower, 2 Infinity towers, the 2-Avery/500 Folsom towers, Rincon Hill, 3-3xx Fremont towers, the Lumina tower, the Jasper, the Four Seasons on Mission next to (and joined) with the old Yelp building, the Harrison, the office building north of the now closed temporary Transbay terminal, the (apparently low cost housing) building west of the same, the building west of that, the Mira, the Salesforce East building and probably a few more.. As I have lived in this area the entire time, I witnessed this firsthand.
Yes, these were decade minus time scale projects, but comparison with the Empire State Building's history is highly unrealistic. Among the problems: 1930 was literally the year after the Crash of 1929 and the beginning of the Great Depression; it was an America still at the cusp of its Industrial Age might - starting to decline in the GFC 1.0 (2008 was GFC 2.0) only to be turbocharged by World War 2, but still the financial capital of the world's greatest manufacturing nation at that time.
Despite this - SF projects could be pretty fast, too: The Infinity towers were started in 2005 and completed in 2008, for example, despite the finding of a wooden ship while digging one of the foundations: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SAN-FRANCISCO-Few-clues-unearthed-about-mystery-2570370.php
This delayed the project but I'm not sure how much. It was certainly months as there was a fuss over how to extract and preserve it.
In any case, I do find it astoundingly ironic that Nader is now being criticized as the spiritual founder of the NIMBY/YIMBY movement - if what I scanned from the book review is accurate.
I really enjoyed this one! It moved quickly and was informative about a topic that I wouldn’t have looked into myself.
In a bit of an odd twist I want to offer some critical feedback because I enjoyed this one so much. Of course the whole “man in the arena” principles applies - you’re a better writer than me - but hopefully this is valuable. I’m on mobile, so please excuse any typos.
Your structure is pretty stellar. Your sentences within a paragraph are well ordered. They move the reader from one idea to next in a way that feels low friction. Your paragraphs are well ordered too. It felt like ideas built upon each other in a way that was intuitive and facilitated understanding.
Something about your sentences feels like it’s not quite there. This “not quite there” feels like the only thing standing between “I really enjoyed this essay” and “Oh shit, this person is a stellar writer”.
I don’t have a great sense of it, but my general feeling was that there were a whole lot of commas. This is less a “write short, boring sentences like that one author” thing and more a “maybe there are a whole bunch of clauses, and it’s hard ordering those effectively” thing?
I think this was partially driven by the tone. The playful and familiar tone was nice, but it also felt unrefined and possibly a bit heavy handed in its application. Scott manages to play with this tone really well. I can’t pin down the difference off the top of my head though.
And I’m terrible at conclusions, so I should be the last person to judge here, but it felt like a tonal shift that was inconsistent with the rest of the review. You came on with a strong conclusion, obviously in contrast to the author’s weak stances, but it was light on context that would have made it more coherent. Many of the references to the election cycle could have stood an extra sentence. It felt like you lost track of the audience and started writing for somebody else.
I imagine you’re sick of the essay by now - you clearly put a lot of time and effort into it already - but I bet you’d get a lot of revisiting it in a few months and giving it an edit. It feels like you’re just on the precipice of being a really great writer, and that might be enough to tip you over the edge.
Nice, thanks. I liked the way that Nader making behind the scenes court cases that relied on technicalities, rhymed with Njal's Saga.
An outstanding review. Well written. One question:
"Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would later become a powerful senator and the namesake for a disappointing train station". Can anybody enlighten me about this quote? As one who has traveled through Penn Station and now Moynihan quite often, the new station is orders of magnitude better than what it replaced.
It would be a strong and nuanced review, if not for jarring simplistic partisanship. When every elected Republican is an unmitigated disaster, it's unsurprising that eventually you get "populist demagogues". It's not like "progressives" ever saw the difference!
This was a fascinating and well written summary of a period of history I knew nothing about. Really nice work!
It seems really hard to distinguish between A) the world where excessive litigation led to government stasis, and B) the world where government stasis led to excessive litigation. From this analysis, Nader seems to get a lot of credit for being the one to notice that the courts offered better recourse than legislative bodies did, but that would also be true in a world where secular declines in congressional function made legislation a less and less attractive option relative to litigation, and the world was just waiting for somebody like Nader to popularize the method.
Like, this is also the era when we saw a similar hand-off from congress to the courts in lots of other domains too. For example, this is about the same time that amending the constitution got so difficult that most people don't even bother counting it as an option any more. And in culture wars, the Civil Rights Act of the early 1960s was passed through congress; Obergefell vs Hodges of the 2010s was a court case. Etcetera. In that kind of world, wouldn't your default expectation be some kind of Nader-like figure initiating an era of litigious nonprofits?
It's odd how this review managed to make the subject boring. It should be very interesting to see how regulatory capture happened, and yet the moment it mentioned the New Deal, part of my brain went "I already *know* this" and switched off.
So I'm sorry but I couldn't make it through this one.
> Having learned nothing from the Reagan years, he once again inaccurately predicted that a Bush victory would actually be better for the country, because it would fire up the progressive movement.
I think a point could be made that eight years of GWB were essential for the incubation of the woke movement.
> Nader tipped the election to Bush, who did such a bad job that even his own party completely repudiated his legacy.
{{citation needed}}
This is obviously culture war territory, but in the reality branch I am in GWB was actually reelected. The military industrial complex and big oil also did fine under him. If the GOP disowned every former president with a history of military interventionism then GWB should have plenty of company.
IMHO, Bush was terrible for human rights (while I am sure that plenty of presidents were willing to allow torture to happen during the cold war, at least none of them made it official state policy), the countries he invaded and US long term security interests, to mention just a few things. Last time I checked, the GOP has not even 'completely repudiated' Florida Man after he encouraged his followers to storm the Capitol.
Second, I feel the idea that Nader is somehow morally responsible for GWB laughable. A causal link does not imply moral responsibility, if we go by that, then his kindergarden teacher is just as responsible for not killing him in infancy (and thus preventing his presidency). Moral responsibility for the deeds of any president lies with that president, his party and cronies, his voters and the congress persons who voted for his laws (e.g. the Iraq Resolution).
Casting Bush v Gore as an end-bringer fight in which everyone is supposed to disregard their differences and work together to defeat the common foe is badly misstating things. GWB did not exactly run on a platform of waterboarding and bombing foreigners in 2001.
If someone offers you a deal which is more advantageous than no deal, but also unfair, game theory (or at least EY) advises to accept only with a certain probability, so that the expected gain by the other party is no higher than if they offered you a fair deal in the first place. If Gore told Nader: "Endorse me because I am more aligned with you than Bush is", Nader might rationally chose to defect instead. Or he was just an egoistical asshole, I dunno, he was mostly before my time.
Boy, that was a good one. Thanks
best part of this from an optics standpoint is how the writer contextualizes for the reader how impressive his own review is. he doesn’t just spice things up for you, he makes sure you give him the credit and not the source material.
As a Californian, the Nader-related environmental revolution that kicked into gear about 1969 strikes me as covertly conservative.
Basically, everybody in California thinks the place was best the day they moved to it and it's been all downhill ever since. So, for 50 years, the government has been avoiding do things that would encourage change in California.
Back in the Governor Pat Brown Era (1959-1967), the state government built giant things (dams, college campuses) to attract more people to move to California. But by the first Governor Jerry Brown Era (1975-1983), the "Era of Limits," the state government impeded doing big things that would encourage more people to live in California.
I’m just here to offer the future of this comment section the line ‘unsafe at any takeoff speed.’
The author signaled his level of political partisanship to get votes for his the review from leftists. He is a more astute politician than Nader.
The author of this appears to have forgotten that there is a difference between “the government can do things” and “private citizens can do things.” He therefore starts by saying “the reason houses cannot be built [by private citizens] is because of Nadar,” and then continues to explain how Nadar set a precedent of people being able to sue to stop the government from doing things. He appears to have entirely skipped the step where a given individual or company building an apartment complex on his or its own property became considered equivalent to government action, which would be necessary for his first claim to follow from his second. In general, the author gives the impression of being not just a liberal but a liberal suffering from severe typical mind fallacy, perhaps intellectually understanding that non-liberals exist but not intuitively understanding it; I would like to point out to him that the beliefs “private citizens should be able to build things on their own property” and “government bureaus should not be able to arbitrarily grab land and develop it as they like” are not only compatible but explicitly both held by a very large number of people. I apologize if the author is already aware of this, but if so it did not come through in this essay. The result was perplexing to put it mildly.
Nader’s most lasting impact, it seems to me, was demolishing the American WASP order that had allowed government business to get done with handshakes. I suppose it always had to end eventually, but he replaced a system that functioned on a certain gentlemanly trust with a system based entirely on mistrust overnight. Nobody was really ready for that.
It’s funny, right at the point in this review where it says “ what if one guy was responsible for starting all of this?” I thought for a few seconds and came up with “seat belt laws and catalytic converters - Nader.” it was extremely surprising to scroll down just a bit more and see...yep, him.
Growing up as a would-be third generation nuclear engineer, in a family that spends a lot of time together rebuilding classic cars and debating automaker lore, I heard plenty about the effects of Nader when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s. Both in specifics (suing various parts of the government into tighter and tighter bureaucracy) and general trends (the post-war transformation of American society into a litigation-centric civil culture).
> I’m still not sure why this was the kind of thing someone would study in law school.
The "double-injury theory" is a basis on which the hurt person can sue the automobile manufacturer because the interior of the auto isn't safe enough in an accident.
> Okay, this is a slightly unfair dig at Moynihan, who was genuinely concerned with the plight of African-Americans, even if his analysis of its causes seems retrograde today.
Certainly there are cultural elements to poverty. In "The Autobiography of Malcolm X", he doesn't use this description, but he does mention instances where the Nation of Islam did training to convert lower-class blacks into middle-class blacks by instilling a lot of boringly middle-class behaviors in place of lower-class behaviors that middle-class people would condemn.
Great stuff. I wonder how much this dynamic (we started suing the government, and it was great, but now everyone does it, and we need to find a new paradigm) falls into the category of unintended consequences and how much it's a kind of dialectic, where each wave of reform necessarily needs to be followed by an antithesis. By the way, I think the dialectic is perhaps the single most underrated philosophical concept right now.
This reminds me of when I was on the board of a PIRG in the 90s and was personally widely respected, but
A) the board just did whatever the ED wasn't, which was super lame and made being on the board seem pointless.
And B) Energy policy was a huge issue in our state and with our lobbying at the time, and our position as an advocate for students/the environment was "Only carbon free AND No hydro/nuclear", which made us seem like a bunch of idealistic idiots and so no one at the capitol listened to us. I lost the vote on the board even discussing nuclear as an option 17-3 because the ED was against it. And in the aftermath it was clear board members even mostly agreed with me...so stupid. And of course we got trounced in the legislature and there was more electrical deregulation.
Overall good piece. I would have a few quibbles.
>and they were pretty much all men
What is the purpose of a comment like this? Is there some confusion about the sex of decision makers in 1930s/40s America? Just seems needlessly politicizing since there doesn't seem to be a broader point.
>Think about how fucked up New York would be if this had actually gotten built
It seems to me like NYC in general and even Manhattan would be 99.9% the same. This looks like it would have had a big impact on about twenty blocks of lower Manhattan. So?
I have no desire to read this book. I have desire to read whatever this reviewer writes.
Is there a post that explains why Scott and many of the readers of this blog hate "NIBMYism" so much?
"Among the many projects blocked or delayed by lawsuit activism—or the excessive legal review designed to preempt it—are [...] the millions of new homes around the country we should be building but aren’t."
What are the lawsuits preventing new housing? Isn't the housing shortage caused by NIMBY homeowners voting for NIMBY city politicians?
Amazingly an 87 year old Ralph Nader talks civily with Paul Sabin about this book on his Podcast:
https://www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/p/the-remaking-of-american-liberalismnairn-be4#details