Also, from McCains WP article: "Meanwhile, in discussions over proposed U.S. action against Iraq, McCain was a strong supporter of the Bush administration's position.[164] He stated that Iraq was "a clear and present danger to the United States of America", and voted accordingly for the Iraq War Resolution in October 2002."
While it is possible that McCain would have acted differently wrt Iraq as president, I would say the burden of proof is on Kc77 for this one.
I mean, it's not like he didn't give a speech on the topic, he thought that it was a distraction from the war in Afghanistan, that could lose us vital international support and create a failed state that would be occupied by more extremist forces
We can't be sure, but I think a lot of people would have stopped at one war, Afghanistan, rather than going for a second that didn't even have a good rationale.
I don't think that is remotely clear. Bush was more interested in it, but the MIC was driving that train and its not like Gore had some track record of opposing them.
> 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'll also point out, though, that while Wilson didn't say the words, "what's good for GM is good for America," he believed it. "And vice versa," he said, and that's the vice versa.
Yes, that's the vice versa, but to me the significant part is the "and". He put the good of America first and believed that his company would profit thereby, which is kind of the opposite of the way this quote is usually deployed, as a cynical "trickle down"-esque claim that benefitting his company would end up benefitting the country.
Can you give a concrete example of what an individual profit-motivated request looks like (like... what does company A actually want to know, that government agency B presumably knows?)? The PDF there only talks about this in the abstract.
For those who aren’t going to dig through several pages of abstract and intro and dozens of pages of article, here is probably the most relevant section of the intro:
“ Part II delves deeply into how businesses, rather than the news media, are using FOIA. Drawing on original data obtained from six federal agencies, it first documents the extent to which commercial requesters—private entities that seek information as part of their profit-making enterprise—dominate the landscape at some agencies. Then, and perhaps most importantly, it explores the kinds of information businesses seek and exactly how some of the most frequent commercial requesters are actually using the records they obtain. This Part demonstrates that, across a variety of contexts, some of the highest-volume commercial requesters are essentially information-reselling businesses whose profit model depends on obtaining government records at low cost and reselling them, for a higher price, to interested parties. It further shows that the vast majority of all commercial FOIA requests are seeking the same types of routine records.
Part III uses these insights to describe the consequences of commercial FOIA practices, generally demonstrating a privatization of information access. It contends that FOIA’s fee structure essentially subsidizes commercial requesters’ access to records and does so in a way that is highly unlikely to provide the kind of public benefit that justifies the existence of subsidies.”
More to the point: I've gone through some of the details for the first six of the agencies, each agency has a section, starting on page 1383. Looking at the first listed example for each of those agencies, the high-volume FOIA requesters are indeed data reselling businesses. But none of them appear to be nefarious in the data they process, but rather examples of the conventional wisdom about business intelligence -- don't spy on others in your industry, but rather scrape together the publicly available information. Of course, assembling such intelligence is time-consuming, so it's not surprising that there are businesses that earn a living assembling it.
Depends on the purpose of FOIA. It was originally intended to be democracy enhancing, so the people could better interact with government. The profit-making is parasitical on the democracy enhancing function and squeezes it out--many agencies have significant backlogs of FOIA requests, because of these commercial uses.
I mean, at least arguably, don't the resellers provide a collation/summary/curation service to what is otherwise a stream of raw data? Even without any explicit analysis, retrieving vast amounts of government records and putting them in relevant order is worth something. Not to mention dealing with the back-and-forth of the FOIA process itself, as Sniffnoy suggests.
While you're clearly sincere, I'm afraid that you're laboring under a misapprehension. What do you imagine this "raw stream of data" to be? How do you believe it is created? How do you believe it is stored? How do you believe it is retrieved?
I'm not being silly or nit-picking here. You have some kind of model of each of these items, and it is incorrect. I'm asking you to articulate your model before I replay
Well, I'm confused about a different angle here. In what way do commercial FOIA requests prevent individual citizens' ones? Is it just because of backlogs? If so, wouldn't backlogs be worse if more individuals were using FOIA requests?
I worked for an insurance company and we paid third party vendors for their public rate fillings for regulatory and competitive analysis. One vendor was better than another, and getting the fillings from the state governments would have been ridiculously time consuming and user unfriendly.
Instead we got pdf versions and pretty good quality metadata to do analyses on.... I felt like the vendors provided a service in this case. Don't know if they used FOIA though.
How is profit making parasitical? How are people suddenly no longer participants in democracy the moment they get into the office? Seems like businesses wanting government records are a pretty reasonable and good use case for this, and it's only the left bias of academia that sees it otherwise?
Any data set collected by the government that could be released by FFOIA should just be posted for free by the government. They are not providing a service, they are charging rent for something they didn't create.
There is a service to be provided making the government information pretty and user friendly, for things like government contracts data for example. If you use US federal contracts data raw, for example, it's not as user friendly as if you pay a vendor,.... But you do pay a lot, to be fair.
If the government already posted the data why would anyone need FOIA? You can only use FOIA to ask for documents you know exist that are not public. https://www.foia.gov/faq.html
Noah was just writing about this topic, wasn't he? And he (or someone; maybe Matt Yglesias? It's all a blur) was quoting Gavin Newsom as saying "What happened to the California of the 1950s and 60s?" when stuff actually got done. And Smith's answer was "The 70s happened".
It's a real balancing act; stuff getting done often means steamrolling over a variety of individuals. My poor dad worked at Caltrans and got to tell people that the state was going to build a highway through their yard, sorry about that, here's some money, now pack up. It was a miserable 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?
And maybe the Catholic Worker Movement and some other very leftist organizations that began in the 1930s. I wonder where Jane Addams and Hull House fits in.
One interesting factor is direct mail and databases (!) which helped nonprofits build up huge bases of individual donors, allowing them to increase their budgets quite a lot. They then figured out a lot of ways to find the people who would be most interested in supporting a particular cause, and often making those people feel a sense of urgency and potential impact by donating.
Another thing that isn't super-widely known is cy pres awards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cy-pr%C3%A8s_doctrine#Class_actions) where a large portion of a class action settlement may be awarded to a nonprofit working in a related area, when it's considered infeasible to compensate individual victims. Apparently this practice has existed since 1986.
This review states that most of the workers in such organizations were volunteers. I suspect that a lot of them were middle-class to upper-class wives who could hire domestic help. I remember noting that Bill Gates's mother has a long resume including president of the regional United Way and trustee of Univ. of Washington, but given the importance of her husband, I doubt she was doing it for the money.
"10% of the private sector workforce" is pretty significantly different from 10% of Americans. Only a bit over 50% of the population was employed at all, and I would expect a good percentage of them would be working for the government.
I also wonder if people that work for non-profit health care systems or non-profit universities count in that 10% as well. Thats a lot of people doing work for a non-profit that doesn't look like non-profit work as most people probably think of it. It's an interesting stat but needs more explanation to be fully useful.
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.
The catch, of course, is that while politicians as a class are subject to certain non-democratic influences (rich, powerful lobbyists), lawyers and judges are subject to non-democratic influences as well (class interests, cultural assumptions, donor preferences)--and lack the counterbalancing effect of depending on voters for their jobs. That 10% of all employment is funded by people wealthy and educated enough to work this particularly effective lever of political power, with zero political accountability, is not at all healthy for democracy, IMO.
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.
It's not clear that he was bad for Iraq either, since we don't know what the alternative looks like. Saddam Hussein was already a one-man disaster, his sons probably would have been worse, and whatever civil war eventually got rid of the Husseins would have been pretty bloody too. Oh, and whoever deposed him probably would have been some kind of Shia Islamist movement.
On the other other hand it's certainly not clear he can take any nonzero amount of credit for the increase in global life expectancy from 2001-09. (Certainly it's almost entirely due to non-US-President factors
Presumably safety regulations in one place tend to influence design worldwide, so if Nader's efforts caused significant improvements in one place, consumers elsewhere probably got a lot of safety improvement too, just by buying from the same manufacturer.
Presumably yes. But then Germans never bought much US-cars. ;) Mercedes invented the airbag. And Germany reduced it's deaths per 100k by much more than the US. While you still can hardly sue VW for anything in German courts. That said, building new stuff here is pretty tough, too. Even (or esp.) for the government.
The other big unknown, of course, is how much (if any) death and destruction the War on Terror prevented. It was messy but in the end it seems to have actually worked; Islamist terrorism hasn't bothered us for years. In a world where Al Gore responded to 9/11 with a presumably-weaker version of the WoT, would the same result have been achieved?
It's very annoying that we can never, from a utilitarian point of view, know whether the Iraq War was the right move or not. This was actually one of the main things that convinced me not to be a utilitarian, because if we can't decide whether decisions are right or not even with the benefit of hindsight then how the heck are we supposed to do it in advance?
An terrorist attack on the level of 9/11 in the US would probably have been a one-off even if the US had done nothing but strengthen airline security measures.
The Iraq War was hugely expensive, it killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East, it destabilized the region, it led to the creation of ISIS, probably contributed significantly to the Syrian Civil War (at least hundreds of thousands dead, millions of refugees), it was probably illegal and hurt America's image in the world. The result was much worse than anyone mentioned it could be in 2003. Hardly anyone defends it anymore. So we know it was the wrong move. (unless you theorize something completely speculative like, well it might have killed someone who was going to be the new Hitler)
A lot of these points of currently accepted wisdom are really annoying me.
"An terrorist attack on the level of 9/11 in the US would probably have been a one-off even if the US had done nothing but strengthen airline security measures."
I have to say, I am utterly amazed at how many people make the argument that whatever happened in history was inevitable, and would still have happened even if initial factors had been different. How can you possibly know this? Isn't this likely motivated reasoning? Doesn't it go against all common sense to say that after policy x is implemented to achieve result y, and y then happens, that y would have happened anyway (regardless of x)?
"The Iraq War was hugely expensive, it killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East, it destabilized the region,"
How much of that was poor handling of the war by those in charge, rather than an inevitable result of the war? I wish these things weren't lumped together.
"it led to the creation of ISIS,"
How much of that was Obama withdrawing too early to meet an election promise?
"it was probably illegal"
If you mean under "international law", so was basically everything Saddam's government ever did, not to mention half the governments in the world today. Another argument I can't for the life of me understand: despite international law being in all respects a fantasy that is unenforcable and is routinely ignored by dictators on a daily basis with zero consequences, democracies should rigidly observe it even to the point of constraining military action against said dictators. What kind of law deserves respect that makes any real attempt to actually enforce the law itself illegal?
"unless you theorize something completely speculative like, well it might have killed someone who was going to be the new Hitler"
Actually, yes. Saddam had already committed genocide twice, against Shias and against Kurds. What might have been next? Not to mention sending a credible message to potential violent dictators for decades to come that they are not secure, and that even being suspected of arming themselves with WMDs is taking their lives in their hands, whether they actually are or not. The potential benifits of the invasion are immense, long-lasting, and largely invisible. We'll never know what atrocities it has prevented.
None of this is to unquestionably defend the war, but to point out all the factors that people for some reason forget: the difference between the justice of the war and the competence with which it was waged, the effect of withdrawing all troops prematurely, and the question of how many deaths would have happened if Saddam had stayed in power.
And unlike Vietnam and Afghanistan, this war was actually won. Saddam was overthrown and executed, Iraq is a (flawed) democracy now.
Well, yes, it is true I can't know it would have been a one-off. But there wasn't a pattern of major terrorist attacks by foreign actors in the US before the War on Terror, so to give the WoT credit for preventing them doesn't make a lot of sense. (I am not claiming that parts of the WoT weren't effective.)
Some major terror attacks elsewhere, like the train bombings in London and Spain, were probably retaliation for the Iraq War. And it is not as though Islamic terrorism has gone away as a global issue.
To say the Iraq War would have been good if they had made all the right decisions is pointless. Obama wouldn't have had to make the decision to withdraw the troops if there had never been a war. Also, I never heard that the American commanders were incompetent. The problem is that the war started a chaotic series of events that no one could control.
Saddam was a threat before the Gulf War; afterwards he was basically contained.
By international law, I mean the rules that are supposed to govern relationships between states. I don't think most governments are in major violation of that. When the US invades countries on weak premises, it encourages others, like Russia, to do the same thing (or at least it gives them the opportunity to say, "we're just doing what the US did").
No doubt the Iraq War was won militarily, but I don't think the consensus is that it was strategic victory.
Really? 9/11 had absolutely nothing to do with the Iraq war except in the propagandized heads of Americans. If we were teaching the world a lesson it was that the US does not act rationally on the world stage, has no problem invading countries under false pretences, committing war crimes, and paying just about anyone for tips on who might be a terrorist and using that as the sole bases for torturing them and keeping them in jail for the rest of their lives with no trial. You want to know why most of the global south doesn't support us in Ukraine? Well Iraq had a lot to do with it, that and we did everything possible to prevent peace. https://mate.substack.com/p/siding-with-ukraines-far-right-us
>Another argument I can't for the life of me understand: despite international law being in all respects a fantasy that is unenforcable and is routinely ignored by dictators on a daily basis with zero consequences, democracies should rigidly observe it even to the point of constraining military action against said dictators
It's possible to take military action against dictators that is legal under international law. GWI was legal. GWII could have been if WMDs had been found.
"International law" is a fantasy. It's a good sound bite for a lawyer to get on TV.
The problem is that a law requires an enforcement mechanism to be something other than wishful thinking. An "international law" has no enforcement mechanism. There may be a court in a particular nation that considers an act to be both against an "international law" and also for it to be in their jurisdiction, but the likely theory behind that is that it violates a law of that country (like how treaties signed and ratified by the US are considered part of their laws), and the violator is charged under that.
>how treaties signed and ratified by the US are considered part of their laws
That's an arrangement unique to The US. In reallity, the UN can mandate military actions, there is an international. court of justice that has tried various dictators and war crimjnals, etc.
Certain elements in the US don't like that sort of thing , but it exists.
I don't see how its legality depends on the actual existence or discovery of WMDs, rather than on the reasonableness of the belief that they existed. Hussein was pretty clearly trying to head-fake his neighbors into believing he could still nerve-gas them if he was backed into a corner, and it wasn't just the US intelligence apparatus that was fooled by that.
I'd say it would have been a one-off even if there were no official policy changes whatsoever. The people onboard the planes realized they were being used as KEW rather than hostages, and started fighting back accordingly, before the attack was even over. Somebody trying the same thing again would've been dogpiled before they got a chance to take control of the plane... unless they managed to recruit enough martyrs to actually win a mostly-unarmed infantry battle against the other passengers and crew. Not just in a last-man-standing sense, but breach a crowded choke point before the pilot finds a safer place to land, or the air force sends an interceptor to shoot them down. Stewardesses can use the drink carts as battering rams, and if it looks like the hijackers are starting to come out on top, reckless aerobatics could literally tilt the field, or shake it like a snowglobe. Building up resources sufficient to overcome such a challenge would make them much easier for existing intelligence agencies to spot and intercept before anything gets off the ground. It was only possible that once thanks to an element of surprise from so thoroughly betraying the "I might kill you if you make trouble, but keep your head down and you'll probably get to go home safe, whether by ransom or rescue" contract between hijacker and hostage.
Besides, for fight-winning numbers they'd be buying enough tickets to cover most of the cost of fueling and operating a whole plane, so it's probably more bang for the buck to just purchase a fuel tanker truck or 40' shipping container full of mining explosives, remove the hazmat labels, drive it to the target and set it off the old fashioned way.
Exactly. It's not like the Bush administration didn't know that Al Qaeda is a threat; it's just that there wasn't much anyone could do about it without invading Afghanistan. Which I do not think Al Gore would have done prior to 9/11.
> There was a bit of a principled disagreement during the Clinton-Bush transition as to whether the Clinton administration’s focus on non-state security threats was correct, and it seems the Bush team decided to somewhat deprioritize the Clinton-era focus on al-Qaeda relative to state actors and great power conflicts.
>
> A Gore administration would probably not have made that choice, and it’s at least possible that a more consistent top-down focus on al-Qaeda and counterterrorism issues would have led to the unraveling of the plot.
In what way was this intelligence specifically actionable? The protagonists in the Politico version seem to have wanted the US to launch an actual military attack against Afghanistan, which seems a bit much (and which would have had the Politico staff et al declaring POTUS an Evil Warmonger for the unprovoked attack). Otherwise, I don't see how that intelligence was specific enough to call for doing anything that the FBI etc don't already do as a matter of course.
Eight years as vice-president and nothing was done. But Bush gets the stick for not paying sufficient attention for the six months he had as president.
I wasn't sure, either. I'm also not convinced that a President Gore wouldn't have launched a similar "war on terror" or that he wouldn't have done an Iraq war. (I'm not trying to say that Iraq was legitimately a part of the war on terror. I'm only saying that the US and Iraq were on a collision course since the first Gulf War and it's not impossible that something like a regime-changing war would've happened even with Gore at the helm.)
> During most years of the Vietnam war there were less US-troops killed-in-action then people on US-roads.
During every year, by quite a way.
The total US troops killed as a result of Vietnam (even including still MIAs) is about 60K, and the highest year was <17K in 1968, in which year the automobile fatality level was 52K. The lowest auto deaths in the 1956-1975 period was 35K for just that year, 1958. (Obviously, non-US-troop deaths were much worse in Vietnam.)
Not via the courts, but in countries with low or no democracy you just straight up ignore the laws. If enough people break laws, the effort it would take to actually catch and discipline them becomes astronomical, and could kick off a death spiral in which people notice that laws aren't being enforced and go on to keep breaking more important laws.
This is an incentive for authoritarian regimes to actually do a bit of propaganda legwork to convince people of the benefits of following the law. If it's very obviously against a huge number of people's self interest, people will notice other people doing it and not getting caught and start doing it too.
Examples of very strict laws which heavily depended on public goodwill to actually pull off - pandemic restrictions in China and Australia, in 2020 (situation changed post vaccine). In 2020, watching massive death tolls in the US and Europe, most Chinese and Australian citizens did in fact concur that it is in our best interest to stay at home - enough that actually enforcing the law against the minority that broke it became doable. You notice that China did eventually drop their restrictions because the enforcement effort became impossible as public opinion shifted. I know Aus is a democracy but we used an authoritarian emergency response measure to impose the laws, so I'd still count it as an authoritarian law in this instance (not that it's bad, but there is still a lever where citizens can limit what an authoritarian state does to their freedoms).
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.
Intriguing. Though a different kind of lawsuit. Post the Burning, Mord's lawsuit failed and the ensuing battle was horrific until the Njal party had to stop for fear that they would be bankrupted by all their killing.
The feud stops when Kari simply walks into Flosi's hall and sits down to dinner. He later marries Flosi's daughter, the widow of a man murdered by the Njalssons. As I said, Njals Saga is deceptively complicated.
Really? I hate it. It's much more explicitly one-sided than most, and not even in a cool self-aware way but like a smug and oblivious "doesn't everyone already agree with me anyway (except for maybe some stupid hicks pfft lol)?"- way.
Yeah, there's a lot of the author assuming consensus among their readers, which is one of my biggest pet peeves. Maybe it's just a contrarian streak, but this style of writing where the author just sort of assumes I'm part of the cool in-crowd who shares their values implicitly immediately triggers my "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" response.
> 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"?
I don't get it either (and still don't). All it made me think of was "So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate" (Matthew 19:6) which is about marriage.
I think he's saying they aren't going to listen to any of the smaller local governments inside the valley. It has to be developed as one valley, we're in charge of that, and we don't care what people with a narrower perspective say.
Right, the quote wasn't particularly immodest in general, instead it was in regard to a particular constitutional issue of the time involving the novel creation of a supra-state organization by the federal government.
FDR was fascinated by water, and he felt that watersheds, such as the Tennessee River Valley, were more natural than old political units, such as states. I can recall reading in Michael Barone's history "Our Country" that at one point FDR mused over throwing out the 48 states and starting over by dividing the USA up into seven watersheds for administrative purposes. (But I've never seen that confirmed elsewhere, so maybe I'm remembering it wrong.)
George Clooney's soliloquy at the end of the Coen Brothers' "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" as the reservoir waters rise is a good epitome of the New Deal philosophy behind the Tennessee Valley Authority.
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.
Industry tends to organize and coordinate responses to government action. They hire people who follow what the government is doing and can alert their bosses to upcoming or proposed changes. It's obvious that they would do this, and not nefarious. I don't think there's any reason to assume that there's some kind of concerted effort to bog down regulatory agencies as you've described.
There's nothing deceptive or manipulative in a group of companies from related industries all having an interest in responding. If they are saying similar things (like "this rule will cost us billions and may destroy our industry") then it makes sense for the government to respond differently than if fewer companies were writing them - even if all of them say the same thing. And the government should care that their rules may harm industries.
Neither may public interest groups. Honestly the nonprofit advocacy group I worked at for 4 years lied jsut as systematically and regularly as the energy company and they were better at it and it is a was a larger portion of their operations.
The idea that "West Texas Housing Coalition" (or whatever) is more committed to truth but than "West Texas Oil Company" is kind of one of the big lies of modern America/leftism.
They are both organizations selling something and don't really give two fucks about the truth.
> 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...
"The book became an immediate bestseller, but also prompted a vicious backlash from General Motors (GM) who attempted to discredit Nader by tapping his phone in an attempt to uncover salacious information and, when that failed, hiring prostitutes in an attempt to catch him in a compromising situation.[17][18] Nader, by then working as an unpaid consultant to United States Senator Abe Ribicoff, reported to the senator that he suspected he was being followed. Ribicoff convened an inquiry that called GM CEO James Roche who admitted, when placed under oath, that the company had hired a private detective agency to investigate Nader. Nader sued GM for invasion of privacy, settling the case for $425,000 and using the proceeds to found the activist organization known as the Center for the Study of Responsive Law.[9]"
But it seems to just be a claim by Nader that is now accepted as fact, because someone wrote it down in a book.
Sex outside of marriage was a lot more scandalous in the early '60s. Not that it wasn't widely practiced, and my suspicion is that prostitution was a larger industry then. But you really, really didn't want anyone to present public evidence that you were involved in it.
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.
It wasn't obsolete, it was false from the get go, insofar as it held the Corvair up to be "uniquely" dangerous (as opposed to the objectively true fact that all cars of the era were extremely unsafe by modern standards).
Even before the '64 changes, independent review found that the Corvair was no more dangerous than other contemporary cars. From Wikipedia:
A 1972 safety commission report conducted by Texas A&M University concluded that the 1960-1963 Corvair possessed no greater potential for loss of control than its contemporary competitors in extreme situations.[5] The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) issued a press release in 1972 describing the findings of NHTSA testing from the previous year. NHTSA had conducted a series of comparative tests in 1971 studying the handling of the 1963 Corvair and four contemporary cars—a Ford Falcon, Plymouth Valiant, Volkswagen Beetle, and Renault Dauphine—along with a second-generation Corvair (with its completely redesigned, independent rear suspension). The 143-page report reviewed NHTSA's extreme-condition handling tests, national crash-involvement data for the cars in the test as well as General Motors' internal documentation regarding the Corvair's handling.[6] NHTSA went on to contract an independent advisory panel of engineers to review the tests. This review panel concluded that "the 1960-1963 Corvair compares favorably with contemporary vehicles used in the tests [...] the handling and stability performance of the 1960–63 Corvair does not result in an abnormal potential for loss of control or rollover, and it is at least as good as the performance of some contemporary vehicles both foreign and domestic."
>erhaps Ralph's most baleful influence was creating the notion that advocacy implies the existence ofreasonable evidence.
This is my big complaint about this movement. I grew up immersed in an NPR/leftist worldview that assumed that corporations were bad and these virtuous truth telling advocacy orgs were saving us all from their lies. Then I worked at two of those orgs and with several others and saw they lied just as much, and had vested interests just as much. on top of that often their boards were filled with industry insiders who were using the org as a sock puppet to advocate for solutions which made little sense.
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.
"what was almost but not quite a form of American socialism"
Call it what it was - fascism. It fits the definition (as far as fascism had a definition, not helped by people calling somewhat related and totally unrelated things "fascism").
It was a collaboration between big business, the government, and the big unions to monopolize all power and prevent any rivals. To do this, they implemented many policies that were socialist.
This was not a replacement of the New Deal. The government has more power now than used to, but it has been spread out among many nominally "non-governmental" bodies.
If you run a non-profit to sue the government, many of the members of the agency you're suing are either (ex-)members of or contributors to your non-profit and when you win (via consent decree, which means the judge gets at most a limited look-in to the sweetheart deal) you use the proceeds to sue other fellow-travelers, are you not a part of the governing apparatus?
The agencies have escaped a lot of judicial review due to some precedents set that require judges to defer to experts - unless the defense can impeach them, which is quite difficult when a lot of the questions are ruled out of bounds.
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.
> whereby substantive matters are never tested in a courtroom battle, only technical points that will cause maximum delay
This makes me think back on Njal's Saga. If the legal shenanigans get bad enough, somebody will escalate the battle to something more direct than lawsuits. What would that be? Getting key personnel canceled? Threats of canceling? Has it already happened?
Interesting. Here in Canada the trend isn't necessarily more fires, but our bad years are significantly worse for total area burned. There wasn't a year prior to 1980 with more than 4x10^6 hectares burned, and there's been 7 years since with more, some up to ~80% more that that threshold. We still have years with minimal fire activity.
Some of this is the news cycle. When it's smoky, it gets reported everywhere all at once, rather than just in the local news as the smoke moves from place to place. People want something to blame, and corporations causing climate change is an easy scapegoat.
This is just a wild misrepresentation of the data.
For one, the climate in the north is tropical and entirely different from the south. The North has been getting wetter in recent decades while the south (which was hit worst by the 2020 fires) is getting drier. Maybe it averages out to be wetter, I'm not sure, but it's totally misleading to combine the two.
Here's more on climate trends in Australia. There's plenty to be concerned about.
I'm sure you're prepared to dispute specific points all day, but I'm mostly taking issue with your claim that your outgroup "have no way to check the original science or trends". If that's the way you're engaging with a topic then you're only fooling yourself.
Hehe in my state there was a series of big mining projects where we have very high environmental standards. These are in a historic mining area that is very depressed and badly wants the projects. The projects were delayed decades due to all the red tape. When they finally get the projects pushed through and approved, then a second decade of lawsuits commences. Then when this is finally navigated, there is new legislation to get in the way. Then this is navigated and we get a third decade of lawsuits.
All because some hippies who live 300 miles away think a 2 square mile mine is somehow going to magically destroy" 10,000 square miles of forest in a rea that already saw extremely heavy mining 100 years ago but is now seen as a recreation area.
And of course we get told the modern mine will be "so much worse than those old mines" despite that being you know, completely false.
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."
So you'd posit 4 stages? 1) grass-roots decentralized building, 2) centralized government building (New Deal), 3) grass-roots decentralized obstruction (Naderite advocacy), 4) centralized government obstruction.
There isn't time enough in the world to go into it, but suffice to say that the government thinks of a million ways to wreak havoc with its own mission; processes become the purpose; curiously they don't necessarily harden - a familiar complaint is that "rules" change arbitrarily from one year to the next; and the stupidest and least salient things are those aspects that most beckon certain kinds of people - to focus on when they take such government jobs. Such people can actually be moved along, after causing enough damage and if enough people become aware of their incompetence - but they just move on to another government position to make somebody else's life a misery. No one is fired for being stupid. People of common sense are gold: not because they can change anything, structurally, for the better, but because they know what to ignore and what to emphasize and most importantly why they're doing whatever they're doing in the first place.
A decent portion of my job is telling people which of 70 "super important rules" they can safely ignore because they are never checked and which are super important to follow because they are constantly checked.
Just today I overheard him talking to someone from the government agency (this is in the world of conservation). And this was just minor, he was laughing about it with the guy. But it was this: a sudden request for everything they submit to have a wet signature. Now any given deal will have various deadlines and many, many documents. And he's done many such deals - at least ten - whereas these new folks on the government side are, well, new - they haven't done any. And he's never gotten wet signatures on all this stuff until the final deadline. Because there are so many changes between now and then anyway ... There is no point. The point is to hit the deadlines ...
So no big deal except he will have to track down the person with the power to sign, a whole lot more often. And it just doesn't seem very 2023 ...
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.
This again seems to beg the question. I mean, it’s hardly inconceivable that certain things were better at some time in the past in a given society, and that moving away from that would be regress and going back would thus be progress.
1. I believe conservatives are opposed to progress. A conservative podcaster ( Darryl Cooper ) described himself as believing that the status quo was fragile and valuable and that politics should focus on maintaining order. Progressives usually want progress on race, gender and environmental issues, while bay area free marketeers want progress in technology and industry, so progressives are mostly opposed to what ACX readers call progress.
I use the term based on the old French semicircle. There's "reactionaries", the right wing sitting on the favored right hand of the king, who only act to oppose change. Then there's "conservatives", the center and "natural" party of government, who accept that some change is necessary but not at the expense of the good we already have. Then there's "progressives", the left wing, who believe that the benefit of change is worth the cost of disrupting the good we already have. And there's the "radicals", who don't have a seat because the king will execute them if he catches them, who believe in scrapping the entire existing system and starting from scratch. Plus the "classical liberals", who have their own ideas that don't fit onto this spectrum, and who can sometimes act like any of the other 4 groups.
I realize that practically no one uses these terms like this any more, and maybe no one ever seriously did. But after having been involved in internal politics in non-government organizations, about internal matters that have nothing to do with anything Culture War, I found them to be an extremely helpful set of categories. So I continue to use them internally, and do stuff like translating "liberal" back and forth into American English, British English, and Australian English.
Generally, in spheres in which I think of myself as "progressive", I do so from a "thrive" mindset: we're rich, we're stable, we've got calm governance that can roll back changes if they prove to be a problem, so we should take some chances that have good odds of success. (There isn't enough chaos, so we can afford to create some.) In spheres where those things don't apply, I tend toward one of the other positions.
Agreed. Additionally, I tend to conceptualize Liberalism as being on a different axis. If Liberalism prioritizes individual rights, then the opposite of that should be Collectivism which prioritizes the common good.
But it occurs to me that maybe it's about object-level differences. There's a change: is it good? If so, it's progress. If I'm very confident that the change will be good, why not make it? If I'm fairly confident that the change will be bad, of course I oppose it. In both cases, I'm in favor of "progress".
People rationalize stuff all the time, of course. So if we notice someone who often latches on to new ideas and is overconfident about how well they'll work, maybe we call them "progressive". And if there's someone who is highly skeptical of everything and almost never approves of a proposed change, maybe we call them a "reactionary". So in this sense, it's more about how likely they are to assign a probability of success.
That doesn't apply to something like abortion, though. One side doesn't really **like** it, but thinks that having the option available is a clear good. The other side thinks that it's literally murder. Neither side seems to worry about the chance that they might be wrong.
It's two things: one is that their idea of progress is different, the other is that they have skepticism about "progress" as an idea.
What we call "progressives" in politics usually means idealistic leftists who use activism to effect change. These are often people who (whether they realize it or not) have a kind of metatheory of history that says history tends in a certain direction (in the direction of more "liberation") and it's an ethical imperative to help bring that about. That's why they are so obsessed with "being on the right side of history" and figures in the past who were "ahead of their time".
However, I do think that often the term progressive is used with some irony.
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.
OTOH, unions were quite willing to dust it up, too. The famous Carnegie strike had Carnegie's Pinkerton's inside the plant firing at the workers outside, and the workers firing at the plant with the cannon of the local militia.
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.
Fine, it's not "impossible" to build anything, but building one building a year in the face of enormous demand is not much...
Compare to, say, Melbourne, which has completed eleven buildings of 60+ stories just since 2019 ( https://skyscraperpage.com/cities/?cityID=18 ). I'm sure there's even more extreme examples in China and the Middle East but I wanted to provide a first-world example.
I fully agree it is absolutely possible to build faster.
It is much less clear how helpful that is either in reducing housing costs or meeting "demand".
As I noted: I have lived in this same area as a renter since 2003. The addition of these literally thousands of units of housing ... raised my rent immensely. It literally doubled from 2013 to 2015. It has plateaued since then, but 1/3 to 1/2 of these new housing units are literally empty either literally or because they're owned by absentee owners.
So sure, building fast is possible - it also results in ghost cities. It doesn't reduce housing costs. It doesn't fulfill demand without enormous societal control and/or iron clad planning.
There was certainly increased demand in some sense - this was the peak of the "zero profit, high revenue growth" bubble which is now deflating.
But again: these places weren't occupied instantly. The rental offices for the "for rent" ones were open for many months after the first tenants started moving in. The condos purchased - the human-occupancy rates are quite low if lights in windows are any indication meaning someone may have bought them, but aren't living in many of them.
I'd also note that post-COVID - it is 100% safe to say that demand has receded (and more) vs. the peak, yet rents are still nowhere remotely close to where they were 10 years ago.
San Francisco is still top 5 in rents in the entire US despite literal population loss, tech giants pulling back their SF offices or significantly downsizing (Twitter, Google, Microsoft, etc etc), WFH and more.
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.
I guess I'll add it started losing me in the opening paragraph, when it compared the process of building a single building to the process of building... a single building.
I really didn't like this one, personally. Fairly light on detail, for one, but mainly it was the final thing you mention; it started feeling like the author didn't realize (or perhaps just didn't care) that not everyone shares his/her exact political views — especially on ACX.
I dunno, most of the reviews here seem to manage not to irritate me this way, even when they are all grinding an axe occasionally, so to speak.
(I suppose, if I had to try to explain it: maybe I just didn't like the blithe assumption that "*of course* anyone reading this agrees with my view on this — after all, they're reading, and the other guys are too stupid for that, right?")
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.
The general consensus around Moynihan Station is that it looks nice but has obvious shortcomings. There's nowhere to sit, and the food court and other vendors were clearly chosen to be upscale and instagrammable, which doesn't befit a station whose main users are daily commuters. For all the money spent on it, it's not nearly as good as it could have been.
(It also doesn't expand train capacity above what old Penn could handle, but that's more the fault of Chris Christie for cancelling the Gateway tunnel... and, I guess, Ralph Nader for contributing to a political economy where almost nothing can ever get built.)
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!
Word. Most reviews don't seem to fall into this trap, even when written by a similarly-opinionated author — there's usually *some* effort to universalize appeal, or — at the very least — to justify such sweeping claims.
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.
Construction projects, such as apartment complexes, are often required by local governments to allow for public comment periods. Nonprofits (claiming to represent the public interest) can use this opportunity to launch objections that can dramatically slow or even halt such projects.
The author argues that Nader pioneered the “start a nonprofit that objects to things” style of activism; I think it’s easy to recognize how its prevalence has made building homes difficult.
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?
Gore wouldn’t have invaded Iraq. Hell, McCain wouldn’t have invaded Iraq.
I'm not so sure of that. A _lot_ of the government was champing at the bit to go invade Iraq and had been for many years.
Yes, plenty of democrats were on board with Iraq:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Iraq_Resolution_of_2002#United_States_House_of_Representatives
Also, from McCains WP article: "Meanwhile, in discussions over proposed U.S. action against Iraq, McCain was a strong supporter of the Bush administration's position.[164] He stated that Iraq was "a clear and present danger to the United States of America", and voted accordingly for the Iraq War Resolution in October 2002."
While it is possible that McCain would have acted differently wrt Iraq as president, I would say the burden of proof is on Kc77 for this one.
I mean, it's not like he didn't give a speech on the topic, he thought that it was a distraction from the war in Afghanistan, that could lose us vital international support and create a failed state that would be occupied by more extremist forces
http://www.acronym.org.uk/old/archive/docs/0209/doc14.htm
We can't be sure, but I think a lot of people would have stopped at one war, Afghanistan, rather than going for a second that didn't even have a good rationale.
I don't think that is remotely clear. Bush was more interested in it, but the MIC was driving that train and its not like Gore had some track record of opposing them.
> 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."
Exactly right.
Thanks for pointing that out.
I'll also point out, though, that while Wilson didn't say the words, "what's good for GM is good for America," he believed it. "And vice versa," he said, and that's the vice versa.
Yes, that's the vice versa, but to me the significant part is the "and". He put the good of America first and believed that his company would profit thereby, which is kind of the opposite of the way this quote is usually deployed, as a cynical "trickle down"-esque claim that benefitting his company would end up benefitting the country.
Not to mention that McNamara, famously, had been the first president of Ford outside the Ford family.
That's Charlie Wilson to you, bub. And which Charlie Wilson, eh? <b><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=Electric+Charlie+Wilson">Electric Charlie Wilson</a></b> or <b><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=Engine+Charlie+Wilson">Engine Charlie Wilson</a></b>?
How do businesses use the FOIA to increase profits?
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3846&context=dlj#page=21
I work in FOIA, part of the time. That article looks like an excellent diagnosis. I'm not sure about the prescriptions, though.
Can you give a concrete example of what an individual profit-motivated request looks like (like... what does company A actually want to know, that government agency B presumably knows?)? The PDF there only talks about this in the abstract.
One obvious one is if you do any federal contracting work you will have your info resold to a bunch of people who then solicit you for various scams.
For those who aren’t going to dig through several pages of abstract and intro and dozens of pages of article, here is probably the most relevant section of the intro:
“ Part II delves deeply into how businesses, rather than the news media, are using FOIA. Drawing on original data obtained from six federal agencies, it first documents the extent to which commercial requesters—private entities that seek information as part of their profit-making enterprise—dominate the landscape at some agencies. Then, and perhaps most importantly, it explores the kinds of information businesses seek and exactly how some of the most frequent commercial requesters are actually using the records they obtain. This Part demonstrates that, across a variety of contexts, some of the highest-volume commercial requesters are essentially information-reselling businesses whose profit model depends on obtaining government records at low cost and reselling them, for a higher price, to interested parties. It further shows that the vast majority of all commercial FOIA requests are seeking the same types of routine records.
Part III uses these insights to describe the consequences of commercial FOIA practices, generally demonstrating a privatization of information access. It contends that FOIA’s fee structure essentially subsidizes commercial requesters’ access to records and does so in a way that is highly unlikely to provide the kind of public benefit that justifies the existence of subsidies.”
More to the point: I've gone through some of the details for the first six of the agencies, each agency has a section, starting on page 1383. Looking at the first listed example for each of those agencies, the high-volume FOIA requesters are indeed data reselling businesses. But none of them appear to be nefarious in the data they process, but rather examples of the conventional wisdom about business intelligence -- don't spy on others in your industry, but rather scrape together the publicly available information. Of course, assembling such intelligence is time-consuming, so it's not surprising that there are businesses that earn a living assembling it.
Hm, isn't this a good thing though? They're making money by doing the valuable work of dealing with the FOIA process so others don't have to!
Depends on the purpose of FOIA. It was originally intended to be democracy enhancing, so the people could better interact with government. The profit-making is parasitical on the democracy enhancing function and squeezes it out--many agencies have significant backlogs of FOIA requests, because of these commercial uses.
I mean, at least arguably, don't the resellers provide a collation/summary/curation service to what is otherwise a stream of raw data? Even without any explicit analysis, retrieving vast amounts of government records and putting them in relevant order is worth something. Not to mention dealing with the back-and-forth of the FOIA process itself, as Sniffnoy suggests.
While you're clearly sincere, I'm afraid that you're laboring under a misapprehension. What do you imagine this "raw stream of data" to be? How do you believe it is created? How do you believe it is stored? How do you believe it is retrieved?
I'm not being silly or nit-picking here. You have some kind of model of each of these items, and it is incorrect. I'm asking you to articulate your model before I replay
Well, I'm confused about a different angle here. In what way do commercial FOIA requests prevent individual citizens' ones? Is it just because of backlogs? If so, wouldn't backlogs be worse if more individuals were using FOIA requests?
I worked for an insurance company and we paid third party vendors for their public rate fillings for regulatory and competitive analysis. One vendor was better than another, and getting the fillings from the state governments would have been ridiculously time consuming and user unfriendly.
Instead we got pdf versions and pretty good quality metadata to do analyses on.... I felt like the vendors provided a service in this case. Don't know if they used FOIA though.
How is profit making parasitical? How are people suddenly no longer participants in democracy the moment they get into the office? Seems like businesses wanting government records are a pretty reasonable and good use case for this, and it's only the left bias of academia that sees it otherwise?
Any data set collected by the government that could be released by FFOIA should just be posted for free by the government. They are not providing a service, they are charging rent for something they didn't create.
There is a service to be provided making the government information pretty and user friendly, for things like government contracts data for example. If you use US federal contracts data raw, for example, it's not as user friendly as if you pay a vendor,.... But you do pay a lot, to be fair.
That I don't have a problem with as long as the raw data is available for free. If the government paid for it we all should have access to it.
1. They often do that.
2. That's like maybe .01 percent of requests to the federal government.
If the government already posted the data why would anyone need FOIA? You can only use FOIA to ask for documents you know exist that are not public. https://www.foia.gov/faq.html
thought i was reading a noahpinion piece until i got to the bottom, good job!
Noah was just writing about this topic, wasn't he? And he (or someone; maybe Matt Yglesias? It's all a blur) was quoting Gavin Newsom as saying "What happened to the California of the 1950s and 60s?" when stuff actually got done. And Smith's answer was "The 70s happened".
It's a real balancing act; stuff getting done often means steamrolling over a variety of individuals. My poor dad worked at Caltrans and got to tell people that the state was going to build a highway through their yard, sorry about that, here's some money, now pack up. It was a miserable job.
Matt Yglesias: https://www.slowboring.com/p/community-meetings-arent-democracy
Thanks!
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?
And maybe the Catholic Worker Movement and some other very leftist organizations that began in the 1930s. I wonder where Jane Addams and Hull House fits in.
One interesting factor is direct mail and databases (!) which helped nonprofits build up huge bases of individual donors, allowing them to increase their budgets quite a lot. They then figured out a lot of ways to find the people who would be most interested in supporting a particular cause, and often making those people feel a sense of urgency and potential impact by donating.
Another thing that isn't super-widely known is cy pres awards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cy-pr%C3%A8s_doctrine#Class_actions) where a large portion of a class action settlement may be awarded to a nonprofit working in a related area, when it's considered infeasible to compensate individual victims. Apparently this practice has existed since 1986.
This review states that most of the workers in such organizations were volunteers. I suspect that a lot of them were middle-class to upper-class wives who could hire domestic help. I remember noting that Bill Gates's mother has a long resume including president of the regional United Way and trustee of Univ. of Washington, but given the importance of her husband, I doubt she was doing it for the money.
"10% of the private sector workforce" is pretty significantly different from 10% of Americans. Only a bit over 50% of the population was employed at all, and I would expect a good percentage of them would be working for the government.
I also wonder if people that work for non-profit health care systems or non-profit universities count in that 10% as well. Thats a lot of people doing work for a non-profit that doesn't look like non-profit work as most people probably think of it. It's an interesting stat but needs more explanation to be fully useful.
Yeah that's a very good point.
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.
Plus, the owner ended up becoming responsible for about 12 million Americans' health care.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Permanente
Henry J. Kaiser could be argued to have invented the State of California.
Those were Liberty ships. Nader could have gone to town on them, unsafe at the any speed, even though 12 knot limit. They did win the War though.
>mrówki
Ants, for those who don't speak Polish.
Sorry 'bout that. I am friends with a colony of mrówki immigrated from Poland.
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.
The catch, of course, is that while politicians as a class are subject to certain non-democratic influences (rich, powerful lobbyists), lawyers and judges are subject to non-democratic influences as well (class interests, cultural assumptions, donor preferences)--and lack the counterbalancing effect of depending on voters for their jobs. That 10% of all employment is funded by people wealthy and educated enough to work this particularly effective lever of political power, with zero political accountability, is not at all healthy for democracy, IMO.
Incidentally, this kind of thing seems like it would be a pretty reasonable target for critics of "billionaire philanthropy".
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.
It's not clear that he was bad for Iraq either, since we don't know what the alternative looks like. Saddam Hussein was already a one-man disaster, his sons probably would have been worse, and whatever civil war eventually got rid of the Husseins would have been pretty bloody too. Oh, and whoever deposed him probably would have been some kind of Shia Islamist movement.
On the other other hand it's certainly not clear he can take any nonzero amount of credit for the increase in global life expectancy from 2001-09. (Certainly it's almost entirely due to non-US-President factors
Presumably safety regulations in one place tend to influence design worldwide, so if Nader's efforts caused significant improvements in one place, consumers elsewhere probably got a lot of safety improvement too, just by buying from the same manufacturer.
Presumably yes. But then Germans never bought much US-cars. ;) Mercedes invented the airbag. And Germany reduced it's deaths per 100k by much more than the US. While you still can hardly sue VW for anything in German courts. That said, building new stuff here is pretty tough, too. Even (or esp.) for the government.
The other big unknown, of course, is how much (if any) death and destruction the War on Terror prevented. It was messy but in the end it seems to have actually worked; Islamist terrorism hasn't bothered us for years. In a world where Al Gore responded to 9/11 with a presumably-weaker version of the WoT, would the same result have been achieved?
It's very annoying that we can never, from a utilitarian point of view, know whether the Iraq War was the right move or not. This was actually one of the main things that convinced me not to be a utilitarian, because if we can't decide whether decisions are right or not even with the benefit of hindsight then how the heck are we supposed to do it in advance?
"in the end it seems to have actually worked"
An terrorist attack on the level of 9/11 in the US would probably have been a one-off even if the US had done nothing but strengthen airline security measures.
The Iraq War was hugely expensive, it killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East, it destabilized the region, it led to the creation of ISIS, probably contributed significantly to the Syrian Civil War (at least hundreds of thousands dead, millions of refugees), it was probably illegal and hurt America's image in the world. The result was much worse than anyone mentioned it could be in 2003. Hardly anyone defends it anymore. So we know it was the wrong move. (unless you theorize something completely speculative like, well it might have killed someone who was going to be the new Hitler)
A lot of these points of currently accepted wisdom are really annoying me.
"An terrorist attack on the level of 9/11 in the US would probably have been a one-off even if the US had done nothing but strengthen airline security measures."
I have to say, I am utterly amazed at how many people make the argument that whatever happened in history was inevitable, and would still have happened even if initial factors had been different. How can you possibly know this? Isn't this likely motivated reasoning? Doesn't it go against all common sense to say that after policy x is implemented to achieve result y, and y then happens, that y would have happened anyway (regardless of x)?
"The Iraq War was hugely expensive, it killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East, it destabilized the region,"
How much of that was poor handling of the war by those in charge, rather than an inevitable result of the war? I wish these things weren't lumped together.
"it led to the creation of ISIS,"
How much of that was Obama withdrawing too early to meet an election promise?
"it was probably illegal"
If you mean under "international law", so was basically everything Saddam's government ever did, not to mention half the governments in the world today. Another argument I can't for the life of me understand: despite international law being in all respects a fantasy that is unenforcable and is routinely ignored by dictators on a daily basis with zero consequences, democracies should rigidly observe it even to the point of constraining military action against said dictators. What kind of law deserves respect that makes any real attempt to actually enforce the law itself illegal?
"unless you theorize something completely speculative like, well it might have killed someone who was going to be the new Hitler"
Actually, yes. Saddam had already committed genocide twice, against Shias and against Kurds. What might have been next? Not to mention sending a credible message to potential violent dictators for decades to come that they are not secure, and that even being suspected of arming themselves with WMDs is taking their lives in their hands, whether they actually are or not. The potential benifits of the invasion are immense, long-lasting, and largely invisible. We'll never know what atrocities it has prevented.
None of this is to unquestionably defend the war, but to point out all the factors that people for some reason forget: the difference between the justice of the war and the competence with which it was waged, the effect of withdrawing all troops prematurely, and the question of how many deaths would have happened if Saddam had stayed in power.
And unlike Vietnam and Afghanistan, this war was actually won. Saddam was overthrown and executed, Iraq is a (flawed) democracy now.
Well, yes, it is true I can't know it would have been a one-off. But there wasn't a pattern of major terrorist attacks by foreign actors in the US before the War on Terror, so to give the WoT credit for preventing them doesn't make a lot of sense. (I am not claiming that parts of the WoT weren't effective.)
Some major terror attacks elsewhere, like the train bombings in London and Spain, were probably retaliation for the Iraq War. And it is not as though Islamic terrorism has gone away as a global issue.
To say the Iraq War would have been good if they had made all the right decisions is pointless. Obama wouldn't have had to make the decision to withdraw the troops if there had never been a war. Also, I never heard that the American commanders were incompetent. The problem is that the war started a chaotic series of events that no one could control.
Saddam was a threat before the Gulf War; afterwards he was basically contained.
By international law, I mean the rules that are supposed to govern relationships between states. I don't think most governments are in major violation of that. When the US invades countries on weak premises, it encourages others, like Russia, to do the same thing (or at least it gives them the opportunity to say, "we're just doing what the US did").
No doubt the Iraq War was won militarily, but I don't think the consensus is that it was strategic victory.
Really? 9/11 had absolutely nothing to do with the Iraq war except in the propagandized heads of Americans. If we were teaching the world a lesson it was that the US does not act rationally on the world stage, has no problem invading countries under false pretences, committing war crimes, and paying just about anyone for tips on who might be a terrorist and using that as the sole bases for torturing them and keeping them in jail for the rest of their lives with no trial. You want to know why most of the global south doesn't support us in Ukraine? Well Iraq had a lot to do with it, that and we did everything possible to prevent peace. https://mate.substack.com/p/siding-with-ukraines-far-right-us
If you want to know why 9/11 happened, you can have it straight from the horses' mouth. https://www.miamiherald.com/latest-news/article131466809.ece/binary/ksmlettertoobama.pdf
Honestly, I can't say there is much I disagree with in it. It is factually accurate. No, war does not create peace.
>Another argument I can't for the life of me understand: despite international law being in all respects a fantasy that is unenforcable and is routinely ignored by dictators on a daily basis with zero consequences, democracies should rigidly observe it even to the point of constraining military action against said dictators
It's possible to take military action against dictators that is legal under international law. GWI was legal. GWII could have been if WMDs had been found.
"International law" is a fantasy. It's a good sound bite for a lawyer to get on TV.
The problem is that a law requires an enforcement mechanism to be something other than wishful thinking. An "international law" has no enforcement mechanism. There may be a court in a particular nation that considers an act to be both against an "international law" and also for it to be in their jurisdiction, but the likely theory behind that is that it violates a law of that country (like how treaties signed and ratified by the US are considered part of their laws), and the violator is charged under that.
>how treaties signed and ratified by the US are considered part of their laws
That's an arrangement unique to The US. In reallity, the UN can mandate military actions, there is an international. court of justice that has tried various dictators and war crimjnals, etc.
Certain elements in the US don't like that sort of thing , but it exists.
I don't see how its legality depends on the actual existence or discovery of WMDs, rather than on the reasonableness of the belief that they existed. Hussein was pretty clearly trying to head-fake his neighbors into believing he could still nerve-gas them if he was backed into a corner, and it wasn't just the US intelligence apparatus that was fooled by that.
I'd say it would have been a one-off even if there were no official policy changes whatsoever. The people onboard the planes realized they were being used as KEW rather than hostages, and started fighting back accordingly, before the attack was even over. Somebody trying the same thing again would've been dogpiled before they got a chance to take control of the plane... unless they managed to recruit enough martyrs to actually win a mostly-unarmed infantry battle against the other passengers and crew. Not just in a last-man-standing sense, but breach a crowded choke point before the pilot finds a safer place to land, or the air force sends an interceptor to shoot them down. Stewardesses can use the drink carts as battering rams, and if it looks like the hijackers are starting to come out on top, reckless aerobatics could literally tilt the field, or shake it like a snowglobe. Building up resources sufficient to overcome such a challenge would make them much easier for existing intelligence agencies to spot and intercept before anything gets off the ground. It was only possible that once thanks to an element of surprise from so thoroughly betraying the "I might kill you if you make trouble, but keep your head down and you'll probably get to go home safe, whether by ransom or rescue" contract between hijacker and hostage.
Besides, for fight-winning numbers they'd be buying enough tickets to cover most of the cost of fueling and operating a whole plane, so it's probably more bang for the buck to just purchase a fuel tanker truck or 40' shipping container full of mining explosives, remove the hazmat labels, drive it to the target and set it off the old fashioned way.
Al Gore might not have ignored the Clinton-era intelligence on Al Qaeda, which could have stopped 9/11 completely.
If it was so easy then why didn't the Clinton administration manage to stop 9/11?
Exactly. It's not like the Bush administration didn't know that Al Qaeda is a threat; it's just that there wasn't much anyone could do about it without invading Afghanistan. Which I do not think Al Gore would have done prior to 9/11.
There is a broad consensus that the Bush administration ignored intelligence. See e.g. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/cia-directors-documentary-911-bush-213353/ or read/watch The Looming Tower. Noted alt history enthusiast Matt Yglesias also considers this a possibility: https://www.slowboring.com/p/bad-incentives-and-the-politics-of.
> There was a bit of a principled disagreement during the Clinton-Bush transition as to whether the Clinton administration’s focus on non-state security threats was correct, and it seems the Bush team decided to somewhat deprioritize the Clinton-era focus on al-Qaeda relative to state actors and great power conflicts.
>
> A Gore administration would probably not have made that choice, and it’s at least possible that a more consistent top-down focus on al-Qaeda and counterterrorism issues would have led to the unraveling of the plot.
In what way was this intelligence specifically actionable? The protagonists in the Politico version seem to have wanted the US to launch an actual military attack against Afghanistan, which seems a bit much (and which would have had the Politico staff et al declaring POTUS an Evil Warmonger for the unprovoked attack). Otherwise, I don't see how that intelligence was specific enough to call for doing anything that the FBI etc don't already do as a matter of course.
The Clinton administration ended on January 20, 2001.
Eight years as vice-president and nothing was done. But Bush gets the stick for not paying sufficient attention for the six months he had as president.
I think this is not highly probable.
Gathering and assessing intelligence is doing something. Timing matters for stopping attacks. Well-informed people disagree with your probability assessment, see sibling comment https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-public-citizens/comment/17722207.
(Tangent) one response to your concerns with utilitarianism: maybe utilitarianism does accurately describe what we should ideally do, even though utilitarian calculations are not the best way to practically make decisions. A bit more on this: https://utilitarianism.net/types-of-utilitarianism/#multi-level-utilitarianism-versus-single-level-utilitarianism
I wasn't sure, either. I'm also not convinced that a President Gore wouldn't have launched a similar "war on terror" or that he wouldn't have done an Iraq war. (I'm not trying to say that Iraq was legitimately a part of the war on terror. I'm only saying that the US and Iraq were on a collision course since the first Gulf War and it's not impossible that something like a regime-changing war would've happened even with Gore at the helm.)
> During most years of the Vietnam war there were less US-troops killed-in-action then people on US-roads.
During every year, by quite a way.
The total US troops killed as a result of Vietnam (even including still MIAs) is about 60K, and the highest year was <17K in 1968, in which year the automobile fatality level was 52K. The lowest auto deaths in the 1956-1975 period was 35K for just that year, 1958. (Obviously, non-US-troop deaths were much worse in Vietnam.)
Very interesting, I wonder how citizens from authoritarian countries exploit in similar ways
They don't. Courts in those are a formality, entirely subordinate to the regime. What influence people can exert is almost always informal.
Not via the courts, but in countries with low or no democracy you just straight up ignore the laws. If enough people break laws, the effort it would take to actually catch and discipline them becomes astronomical, and could kick off a death spiral in which people notice that laws aren't being enforced and go on to keep breaking more important laws.
This is an incentive for authoritarian regimes to actually do a bit of propaganda legwork to convince people of the benefits of following the law. If it's very obviously against a huge number of people's self interest, people will notice other people doing it and not getting caught and start doing it too.
Examples of very strict laws which heavily depended on public goodwill to actually pull off - pandemic restrictions in China and Australia, in 2020 (situation changed post vaccine). In 2020, watching massive death tolls in the US and Europe, most Chinese and Australian citizens did in fact concur that it is in our best interest to stay at home - enough that actually enforcing the law against the minority that broke it became doable. You notice that China did eventually drop their restrictions because the enforcement effort became impossible as public opinion shifted. I know Aus is a democracy but we used an authoritarian emergency response measure to impose the laws, so I'd still count it as an authoritarian law in this instance (not that it's bad, but there is still a lever where citizens can limit what an authoritarian state does to their freedoms).
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.
Intriguing. Though a different kind of lawsuit. Post the Burning, Mord's lawsuit failed and the ensuing battle was horrific until the Njal party had to stop for fear that they would be bankrupted by all their killing.
The feud stops when Kari simply walks into Flosi's hall and sits down to dinner. He later marries Flosi's daughter, the widow of a man murdered by the Njalssons. As I said, Njals Saga is deceptively complicated.
Really? I hate it. It's much more explicitly one-sided than most, and not even in a cool self-aware way but like a smug and oblivious "doesn't everyone already agree with me anyway (except for maybe some stupid hicks pfft lol)?"- way.
Yeah, there's a lot of the author assuming consensus among their readers, which is one of my biggest pet peeves. Maybe it's just a contrarian streak, but this style of writing where the author just sort of assumes I'm part of the cool in-crowd who shares their values implicitly immediately triggers my "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" response.
> 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"?
God made it as one valley, so it will be developed as one valley.
Makes sense, since the TVA operates in six states, but could operate across all of them as a unified organization.
I think it's something like "God left the job incomplete, so it's our job to finish (developing) what he couldn't."
I don't get it either (and still don't). All it made me think of was "So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate" (Matthew 19:6) which is about marriage.
I think he's saying they aren't going to listen to any of the smaller local governments inside the valley. It has to be developed as one valley, we're in charge of that, and we don't care what people with a narrower perspective say.
Right, the quote wasn't particularly immodest in general, instead it was in regard to a particular constitutional issue of the time involving the novel creation of a supra-state organization by the federal government.
FDR was fascinated by water, and he felt that watersheds, such as the Tennessee River Valley, were more natural than old political units, such as states. I can recall reading in Michael Barone's history "Our Country" that at one point FDR mused over throwing out the 48 states and starting over by dividing the USA up into seven watersheds for administrative purposes. (But I've never seen that confirmed elsewhere, so maybe I'm remembering it wrong.)
George Clooney's soliloquy at the end of the Coen Brothers' "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" as the reservoir waters rise is a good epitome of the New Deal philosophy behind the Tennessee Valley Authority.
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.
Industry tends to organize and coordinate responses to government action. They hire people who follow what the government is doing and can alert their bosses to upcoming or proposed changes. It's obvious that they would do this, and not nefarious. I don't think there's any reason to assume that there's some kind of concerted effort to bog down regulatory agencies as you've described.
There's nothing deceptive or manipulative in a group of companies from related industries all having an interest in responding. If they are saying similar things (like "this rule will cost us billions and may destroy our industry") then it makes sense for the government to respond differently than if fewer companies were writing them - even if all of them say the same thing. And the government should care that their rules may harm industries.
" And the government should care that their rules may harm industries."
The point is that industry may not be truthful when it says that.
Neither may public interest groups. Honestly the nonprofit advocacy group I worked at for 4 years lied jsut as systematically and regularly as the energy company and they were better at it and it is a was a larger portion of their operations.
The idea that "West Texas Housing Coalition" (or whatever) is more committed to truth but than "West Texas Oil Company" is kind of one of the big lies of modern America/leftism.
They are both organizations selling something and don't really give two fucks about the truth.
I didn't say anything about nonprofits.
The point is “everyone lies” so worrying that the industry might not be truthful is silly. It’s lies from everyone.
That's a bizarre attitude to take.
> 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...
They could lie.
They were probably prostitutes?
The claim, per Wiki, is that they were:
"The book became an immediate bestseller, but also prompted a vicious backlash from General Motors (GM) who attempted to discredit Nader by tapping his phone in an attempt to uncover salacious information and, when that failed, hiring prostitutes in an attempt to catch him in a compromising situation.[17][18] Nader, by then working as an unpaid consultant to United States Senator Abe Ribicoff, reported to the senator that he suspected he was being followed. Ribicoff convened an inquiry that called GM CEO James Roche who admitted, when placed under oath, that the company had hired a private detective agency to investigate Nader. Nader sued GM for invasion of privacy, settling the case for $425,000 and using the proceeds to found the activist organization known as the Center for the Study of Responsive Law.[9]"
But it seems to just be a claim by Nader that is now accepted as fact, because someone wrote it down in a book.
Sex outside of marriage was a lot more scandalous in the early '60s. Not that it wasn't widely practiced, and my suspicion is that prostitution was a larger industry then. But you really, really didn't want anyone to present public evidence that you were involved in it.
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.
It wasn't obsolete, it was false from the get go, insofar as it held the Corvair up to be "uniquely" dangerous (as opposed to the objectively true fact that all cars of the era were extremely unsafe by modern standards).
Even before the '64 changes, independent review found that the Corvair was no more dangerous than other contemporary cars. From Wikipedia:
A 1972 safety commission report conducted by Texas A&M University concluded that the 1960-1963 Corvair possessed no greater potential for loss of control than its contemporary competitors in extreme situations.[5] The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) issued a press release in 1972 describing the findings of NHTSA testing from the previous year. NHTSA had conducted a series of comparative tests in 1971 studying the handling of the 1963 Corvair and four contemporary cars—a Ford Falcon, Plymouth Valiant, Volkswagen Beetle, and Renault Dauphine—along with a second-generation Corvair (with its completely redesigned, independent rear suspension). The 143-page report reviewed NHTSA's extreme-condition handling tests, national crash-involvement data for the cars in the test as well as General Motors' internal documentation regarding the Corvair's handling.[6] NHTSA went on to contract an independent advisory panel of engineers to review the tests. This review panel concluded that "the 1960-1963 Corvair compares favorably with contemporary vehicles used in the tests [...] the handling and stability performance of the 1960–63 Corvair does not result in an abnormal potential for loss of control or rollover, and it is at least as good as the performance of some contemporary vehicles both foreign and domestic."
*ceteris paribus
Thanks, an old friend misphrased it 40 years ago, I with my 1 year college Latin noted the error, but now my intellectual desuetude repeated his.
>erhaps Ralph's most baleful influence was creating the notion that advocacy implies the existence ofreasonable evidence.
This is my big complaint about this movement. I grew up immersed in an NPR/leftist worldview that assumed that corporations were bad and these virtuous truth telling advocacy orgs were saving us all from their lies. Then I worked at two of those orgs and with several others and saw they lied just as much, and had vested interests just as much. on top of that often their boards were filled with industry insiders who were using the org as a sock puppet to advocate for solutions which made little sense.
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.
"what was almost but not quite a form of American socialism"
Call it what it was - fascism. It fits the definition (as far as fascism had a definition, not helped by people calling somewhat related and totally unrelated things "fascism").
It was a collaboration between big business, the government, and the big unions to monopolize all power and prevent any rivals. To do this, they implemented many policies that were socialist.
This was not a replacement of the New Deal. The government has more power now than used to, but it has been spread out among many nominally "non-governmental" bodies.
If you run a non-profit to sue the government, many of the members of the agency you're suing are either (ex-)members of or contributors to your non-profit and when you win (via consent decree, which means the judge gets at most a limited look-in to the sweetheart deal) you use the proceeds to sue other fellow-travelers, are you not a part of the governing apparatus?
The agencies have escaped a lot of judicial review due to some precedents set that require judges to defer to experts - unless the defense can impeach them, which is quite difficult when a lot of the questions are ruled out of bounds.
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.
Almost identical, except for a little 2 block strip near the highway?
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.
> whereby substantive matters are never tested in a courtroom battle, only technical points that will cause maximum delay
This makes me think back on Njal's Saga. If the legal shenanigans get bad enough, somebody will escalate the battle to something more direct than lawsuits. What would that be? Getting key personnel canceled? Threats of canceling? Has it already happened?
Interesting. Here in Canada the trend isn't necessarily more fires, but our bad years are significantly worse for total area burned. There wasn't a year prior to 1980 with more than 4x10^6 hectares burned, and there's been 7 years since with more, some up to ~80% more that that threshold. We still have years with minimal fire activity.
Some of this is the news cycle. When it's smoky, it gets reported everywhere all at once, rather than just in the local news as the smoke moves from place to place. People want something to blame, and corporations causing climate change is an easy scapegoat.
This is just a wild misrepresentation of the data.
For one, the climate in the north is tropical and entirely different from the south. The North has been getting wetter in recent decades while the south (which was hit worst by the 2020 fires) is getting drier. Maybe it averages out to be wetter, I'm not sure, but it's totally misleading to combine the two.
Here's more on climate trends in Australia. There's plenty to be concerned about.
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/environmental-impacts/climate-change/state-of-the-climate/previous/state-of-the-climate-2018/australias-changing-climate
I'm sure you're prepared to dispute specific points all day, but I'm mostly taking issue with your claim that your outgroup "have no way to check the original science or trends". If that's the way you're engaging with a topic then you're only fooling yourself.
Hehe in my state there was a series of big mining projects where we have very high environmental standards. These are in a historic mining area that is very depressed and badly wants the projects. The projects were delayed decades due to all the red tape. When they finally get the projects pushed through and approved, then a second decade of lawsuits commences. Then when this is finally navigated, there is new legislation to get in the way. Then this is navigated and we get a third decade of lawsuits.
All because some hippies who live 300 miles away think a 2 square mile mine is somehow going to magically destroy" 10,000 square miles of forest in a rea that already saw extremely heavy mining 100 years ago but is now seen as a recreation area.
And of course we get told the modern mine will be "so much worse than those old mines" despite that being you know, completely false.
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."
So you'd posit 4 stages? 1) grass-roots decentralized building, 2) centralized government building (New Deal), 3) grass-roots decentralized obstruction (Naderite advocacy), 4) centralized government obstruction.
How exactly does that work? An agency obstructs another agency?
There isn't time enough in the world to go into it, but suffice to say that the government thinks of a million ways to wreak havoc with its own mission; processes become the purpose; curiously they don't necessarily harden - a familiar complaint is that "rules" change arbitrarily from one year to the next; and the stupidest and least salient things are those aspects that most beckon certain kinds of people - to focus on when they take such government jobs. Such people can actually be moved along, after causing enough damage and if enough people become aware of their incompetence - but they just move on to another government position to make somebody else's life a misery. No one is fired for being stupid. People of common sense are gold: not because they can change anything, structurally, for the better, but because they know what to ignore and what to emphasize and most importantly why they're doing whatever they're doing in the first place.
A decent portion of my job is telling people which of 70 "super important rules" they can safely ignore because they are never checked and which are super important to follow because they are constantly checked.
Just today I overheard him talking to someone from the government agency (this is in the world of conservation). And this was just minor, he was laughing about it with the guy. But it was this: a sudden request for everything they submit to have a wet signature. Now any given deal will have various deadlines and many, many documents. And he's done many such deals - at least ten - whereas these new folks on the government side are, well, new - they haven't done any. And he's never gotten wet signatures on all this stuff until the final deadline. Because there are so many changes between now and then anyway ... There is no point. The point is to hit the deadlines ...
So no big deal except he will have to track down the person with the power to sign, a whole lot more often. And it just doesn't seem very 2023 ...
There is so much red tape the tape sticks to itself.
Also exploding in recent years: states suing the government over policies they don't like.
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.
This again seems to beg the question. I mean, it’s hardly inconceivable that certain things were better at some time in the past in a given society, and that moving away from that would be regress and going back would thus be progress.
1. I believe conservatives are opposed to progress. A conservative podcaster ( Darryl Cooper ) described himself as believing that the status quo was fragile and valuable and that politics should focus on maintaining order. Progressives usually want progress on race, gender and environmental issues, while bay area free marketeers want progress in technology and industry, so progressives are mostly opposed to what ACX readers call progress.
I use the term based on the old French semicircle. There's "reactionaries", the right wing sitting on the favored right hand of the king, who only act to oppose change. Then there's "conservatives", the center and "natural" party of government, who accept that some change is necessary but not at the expense of the good we already have. Then there's "progressives", the left wing, who believe that the benefit of change is worth the cost of disrupting the good we already have. And there's the "radicals", who don't have a seat because the king will execute them if he catches them, who believe in scrapping the entire existing system and starting from scratch. Plus the "classical liberals", who have their own ideas that don't fit onto this spectrum, and who can sometimes act like any of the other 4 groups.
I realize that practically no one uses these terms like this any more, and maybe no one ever seriously did. But after having been involved in internal politics in non-government organizations, about internal matters that have nothing to do with anything Culture War, I found them to be an extremely helpful set of categories. So I continue to use them internally, and do stuff like translating "liberal" back and forth into American English, British English, and Australian English.
Generally, in spheres in which I think of myself as "progressive", I do so from a "thrive" mindset: we're rich, we're stable, we've got calm governance that can roll back changes if they prove to be a problem, so we should take some chances that have good odds of success. (There isn't enough chaos, so we can afford to create some.) In spheres where those things don't apply, I tend toward one of the other positions.
Agreed. Additionally, I tend to conceptualize Liberalism as being on a different axis. If Liberalism prioritizes individual rights, then the opposite of that should be Collectivism which prioritizes the common good.
But it occurs to me that maybe it's about object-level differences. There's a change: is it good? If so, it's progress. If I'm very confident that the change will be good, why not make it? If I'm fairly confident that the change will be bad, of course I oppose it. In both cases, I'm in favor of "progress".
People rationalize stuff all the time, of course. So if we notice someone who often latches on to new ideas and is overconfident about how well they'll work, maybe we call them "progressive". And if there's someone who is highly skeptical of everything and almost never approves of a proposed change, maybe we call them a "reactionary". So in this sense, it's more about how likely they are to assign a probability of success.
That doesn't apply to something like abortion, though. One side doesn't really **like** it, but thinks that having the option available is a clear good. The other side thinks that it's literally murder. Neither side seems to worry about the chance that they might be wrong.
It's two things: one is that their idea of progress is different, the other is that they have skepticism about "progress" as an idea.
What we call "progressives" in politics usually means idealistic leftists who use activism to effect change. These are often people who (whether they realize it or not) have a kind of metatheory of history that says history tends in a certain direction (in the direction of more "liberation") and it's an ethical imperative to help bring that about. That's why they are so obsessed with "being on the right side of history" and figures in the past who were "ahead of their time".
However, I do think that often the term progressive is used with some irony.
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.
OTOH, unions were quite willing to dust it up, too. The famous Carnegie strike had Carnegie's Pinkerton's inside the plant firing at the workers outside, and the workers firing at the plant with the cannon of the local militia.
What goes around comes around. Took until Margaret Thatcher to find out that you can annihalate unions without a single bullet.
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.
Fine, it's not "impossible" to build anything, but building one building a year in the face of enormous demand is not much...
Compare to, say, Melbourne, which has completed eleven buildings of 60+ stories just since 2019 ( https://skyscraperpage.com/cities/?cityID=18 ). I'm sure there's even more extreme examples in China and the Middle East but I wanted to provide a first-world example.
I fully agree it is absolutely possible to build faster.
It is much less clear how helpful that is either in reducing housing costs or meeting "demand".
As I noted: I have lived in this same area as a renter since 2003. The addition of these literally thousands of units of housing ... raised my rent immensely. It literally doubled from 2013 to 2015. It has plateaued since then, but 1/3 to 1/2 of these new housing units are literally empty either literally or because they're owned by absentee owners.
So sure, building fast is possible - it also results in ghost cities. It doesn't reduce housing costs. It doesn't fulfill demand without enormous societal control and/or iron clad planning.
"The addition of these literally thousands of units of housing ... raised my rent immensely."
Did anything else happen at the same time? Was demand for housing unchanged?
There was certainly increased demand in some sense - this was the peak of the "zero profit, high revenue growth" bubble which is now deflating.
But again: these places weren't occupied instantly. The rental offices for the "for rent" ones were open for many months after the first tenants started moving in. The condos purchased - the human-occupancy rates are quite low if lights in windows are any indication meaning someone may have bought them, but aren't living in many of them.
I'd also note that post-COVID - it is 100% safe to say that demand has receded (and more) vs. the peak, yet rents are still nowhere remotely close to where they were 10 years ago.
San Francisco is still top 5 in rents in the entire US despite literal population loss, tech giants pulling back their SF offices or significantly downsizing (Twitter, Google, Microsoft, etc etc), WFH and more.
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.
I guess I'll add it started losing me in the opening paragraph, when it compared the process of building a single building to the process of building... a single building.
I really didn't like this one, personally. Fairly light on detail, for one, but mainly it was the final thing you mention; it started feeling like the author didn't realize (or perhaps just didn't care) that not everyone shares his/her exact political views — especially on ACX.
I dunno, most of the reviews here seem to manage not to irritate me this way, even when they are all grinding an axe occasionally, so to speak.
(I suppose, if I had to try to explain it: maybe I just didn't like the blithe assumption that "*of course* anyone reading this agrees with my view on this — after all, they're reading, and the other guys are too stupid for that, right?")
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.
The general consensus around Moynihan Station is that it looks nice but has obvious shortcomings. There's nowhere to sit, and the food court and other vendors were clearly chosen to be upscale and instagrammable, which doesn't befit a station whose main users are daily commuters. For all the money spent on it, it's not nearly as good as it could have been.
(It also doesn't expand train capacity above what old Penn could handle, but that's more the fault of Chris Christie for cancelling the Gateway tunnel... and, I guess, Ralph Nader for contributing to a political economy where almost nothing can ever get built.)
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!
Yeah I agree with this. They even had to dunk on Moynihan, one of the few politicians I liked.
The dunk was sophomoric, too. Watch three random episodes of The Wire and tell me there aren't some cultural problems in West Baltimore.
Word. Most reviews don't seem to fall into this trap, even when written by a similarly-opinionated author — there's usually *some* effort to universalize appeal, or — at the very least — to justify such sweeping claims.
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?
>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.<
The Civil Rights Act was based on Brown V Board of Education, a court case in the '50's.
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.
Construction projects, such as apartment complexes, are often required by local governments to allow for public comment periods. Nonprofits (claiming to represent the public interest) can use this opportunity to launch objections that can dramatically slow or even halt such projects.
The author argues that Nader pioneered the “start a nonprofit that objects to things” style of activism; I think it’s easy to recognize how its prevalence has made building homes difficult.
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?
That being said, I probably won't get a notification for the reply due to a bug(?) in Substack
"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