Regulations don't take up physical space. There's no "room" for them to run out of. They can, in theory, keep piling up until the society collapses. Maybe such piling up is what caused ancient societies to collapse (or get taken over by less sclerotic societies), and we're slowly headed toward another collapse.
This seems to be the primary mechanism for deregulation historically. Increasing regulation until the burden is too great. Collapse of some kind, new leadership, gradually repeat the increase in regulation again.
The real trick is somehow achieving deregulation without the strife. Not many examples of that at scale so far, sadly.
David is right about this. Think of how code tends to grow and grow until at some point you have to just dump the legacy implementation and write everything from scratch. If subtractive ideas were sought after and implemented it wouldn’t happen that way.
I've seen that in my own workplace with regard to SOPs we rewrote in conjuction with the in-house development and deployment of a new software system. We started with a very simple default sequence of procedures which set up a default flow that we thought would be good enough to get started and which should work 95٪ of the time, and which had its own kind of simplified internal logic and lexicon to describe certain states or activities with technical meanings distinct from the plain language interpretations but which everyone using the system would quickly learn to use to communicate with accuracy and precision.
We quickly ran into problems with needing to make exceptions, skip steps, do things in reverse in special cases, "Unless X, but not when Y, except when Z". Despite trying desperately to make people use the system as intended and not try to circumvent the rules, people constantly chafed at the burdens of doing things the proper way and used the exigency of their mission or leveraged their social network and organizational power to try and obtain special privileges and then use that as precedent to establish a new rule just for them or just for that mission type. Then others would find out and demand the same privileges or threaten to make accusations of unfairness, etc.
We attempted to record all this in so many revisions to the SOP that it became a kind of living document full of the equivalent of 'kludges upon kludges", as the basic outline continued to get "fleshed out" at length in fractal detail like a Westlaw outline or Restatement of Torts or something. We tried to see if we could somehow reformulate a new default model that could be a simple pattern with just a few exception rules that could capture most of the complexity of the evolving mess like some kind of attempt to do a factor analysis for possible best-fit abstractions, but it was almost immediately obvious that the whole effort was impossible and futile even if the dust had settled on the dynamic factors of people maneuvering to make new changes to the rules. We then thought that it would be best to "tighten things up" and look for the pattern-outlier exceptions which, if dropped, would give the biggest bang for the buck in terms of making a pattern for remainder more accurate in most cases. But by this point every single corner and edge case and exception existed because it had its own concentrated-interest constituency which would defend it to the death and make trouble and headaches for us and the leadership in the process. But even more contributing to the cementing inertia and entrenchment of the system in the grotesque form into which it had evolved was the small army of workers who were most responsible for administering and processing the systems activities and records, because they had all invested considerable time and effort in mastering the activity and terminology, had something akin to job security because they were far up a learning curve that had grown mountainous in size, and would resist any attempt whatsoever to make them have to go through the painful process of having to relearn what was in or out or, horrors, start over from scratch. So we just have learned to accept our fate and live with the monstrosity and related burdens and dysfunctions that are its consequence. Hey, it's a living.
the people with an interest in regulations have clear benefits. the people with interest in derugalition tend to be more distant from the benefits and the know-how to make it happen.
Because a legislator's job is to edited word with people; that's their raison d'etre. Laws never get taken off the books. The executive branch can pass laws now. Individual bills are illegibly long; in the 2010s we saw 775,734 new Federal Register pages, for an average of 77,573 pages added per year, no kidding.
Because no one tries to do otherwise, in a substantial and novel manner. We do not have the ability to try to do otherwise, or even think about trying to do otherwise. Humanity is trapped in a reality dome, largely of its own making.
One reason people might publicly support 'bad' regulation without being either ignorant or irrational is because they have valid expectations of even worse outcomes in the absence of the regulation, but they cannot explicitly articulate the logic behind these expectations without suffering severe social penalties. So they have to lie about the real reasons, in the language of some "socially acceptable excuse."
The SAE is often a position that is not well-supported by logic or evidence, but no one cares, because that's not the point. The point is to exchange the currency of tacit common knowledge with other socially savvy people who "get it" that the SAE is a cover story and a "hypocritical veto of last resort" when the genuine reason fully justifying a veto on other grounds is not able to be argued.
Someone is going to ask me to give an example of this for housing, but this is exactly the problem. The examples are socially undesirable taboos and liable to trigger negative emotions and volcanic passions that will derail the discussion and lead to a lot of ad hominem and premature rejection.
So instead I'll make up an example from a lighter subject and very much removed from our contemporary context.
There are a few movies such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Everything Is Illuminated in which dropping an American vegetarian into an Old World culture is used as an opportunity for culture-clash comic relief. In those two movies an Eastern European country is portrayed as somewhat backward and unenlightened as well as more uniform in tastes and (simple, primitive) moral sentiments. That is, where not only does everybody eat meat, but exaggerated into a caricature where they practically don't eat anything besides meat, have never ever heard of the idea of anyone voluntarily abstaining from meat out of ethical considerations, and literally cannot wrap their heads around the idea that such a person is in their company and not completely crazy.
Now, the vegetarian in such a situation may be rudely put on the spot to explain himself, but the moment he tries to do so, he realizes that it will take extreme amounts of effort to bridge the conceptual distance and that in the process of trying he may come off at superior or smug or contemptuous of his morally inferior and unenlightened hosts or risk breaching etiquette or causing serious offence for reasons he doesn't and should not be expected to know. That's why it's rude to put him on the spot, you should know he doesn't know the local etiquette and framework of sensitivities, and so insisting that he explain himself is like insisting that he walk through a minefield. Rude!
Now, realizing all this, the vegetarian needs a socially acceptable excuse. He cannot give the real reason without it being counterproductive. They won't get it at best, and they could also get offended and kick him out or worse. But if he doesn't give some kind of reason, they will keep insisting that he try the sausages and find it weird or insulting if he keeps refusing for no apparent reason. So he has to lie and give a fake reason. But it has to be the kind of reason that they will accept as the kind of thing that settled the matter, puts an end to the conversation and insistence, and allows for changing the subject.
A good example of a great socially acceptable excuse is to claim one has a medical condition. That is hard to verify, it's rude to express skepticism, and people want to signal to others around that they are compassionate and care and say, "Oh you poor baby!"
So the vegetarian says, "Oh, I'm allergic", or "I was bitten by a lone star tick and now I have Alpha-gal syndrome" or "I am getting a medical scan next week and the doctor says I can't eat meat until then!", or "I am taking a special medication and I have to keep my protein level below Y", or whatever.
This is the vegetarian's "hypocritical veto of last resort". It's not the truth, but it's also not the case that he doesn't have a valid, justifiable truth. It's just that he can't say what it is, in part because the people he would have to say it to are predictably not going to be fair or reasonable in their reaction to what he has to say. So he has to say something else which is his fallback contingency for how to accomplish his legitimate objective when the rules of his social milieu take the more honest ways off the table.
Having to use a hypocritical veto of last resort is a low-equilibrium not just because of the dishonesty but because in the honest equilibrium one might be willing to discuss, negotiate, and come to positive-sum compromises for superior regulations that are less likely to harm legitimate interests. But you can't negotiate trades when the things you want in exchange for your agreement are deemed to deplorable and illegitimate preferences.
In such circumstances one is forced to forgo these gains from trade and accept a lower level of welfare as the only way to defend those interests, as if they were acting in accordance with a right that the social rules said they were entitled to exercise without having to provide any public explanations or justifications whatsoever. in general, not being able to have certain honest discussions without exposing oneself to substantial social risks is a big reason behind, "This is why we can't have nice things."
At least one of those words is underdefined in natural language. On any case there are humans at many different points along a spectrum that runs from "Holds opinions and takes actions that have no relationship to defineable goals or to any understanding of the physical world" to "Flawless superintelligence with maximally complete understanding of everything which it uses to always make globally optimal choices in service of fully well-defined goals."
No idea what your 'standard checks' are, but if you have the capability to test such a thing, then plausibly 'you' should be the first answer you come up with? I don't mean that as snark, I just mean that if you have enough confidence to make such a judgment, you can apply it to your own thoughts/writings/conclusions and adjust accordingly until you meet your own approval.
Otherwise: yes, I can think of some people, but not all public figures, and no one on whom I'd expect to find universal agreement. I think judging on writing depends a lot on tolerance for metaphor and abstraction and handwaviness, as well as preferred style.
Well, on Planet Earth you will find them classified under the category "Pedantry". It is a very clever trick, imagine if our entire world ran upon it.
>..but if you have the capability to test such a thing, then plausibly 'you' should be the first answer you come up with?
I believe there to be no such thing as a rational human, by the very definition of the term. On certain topics (most, as luck would have it), observing people declare their thinking *to be* [necessarily] rational is one of the very best places to find high quality evidence.
> ...if you have enough confidence to make such a judgment, you can apply it to your own thoughts/writings/conclusions and adjust accordingly until you meet your own approval.
I like this style of thinking very much, it should be applied everywhere.
> Otherwise: yes, I can think of some people, but not all public figures...
Please list a public figure who has speaking or writing online so I can see if I can detect any irrationality of any kind in their claims, explicit or implicit.
> I think judging on writing depends a lot on tolerance for metaphor and abstraction and handwaviness, as well as preferred style.
Indeed. And in addition to that: basing *judgment* (discernment, etc) on this sort of a foundation (as we do) is an effective means for a semi-conscious life form to trap itself in a Reality Dome of its own making, *forever*.
I don't mean that as snark, I just mean that if you have enough confidence to make such a judgment, you can apply it to your own thoughts/writings/conclusions and adjust accordingly until you meet your own approval.
Otherwise: yes, I can think of some people, but not all public figures, and no one on whom I'd expect to find universal agreement. I think judging on writing depends a lot on tolerance for metaphor and abstraction and handwaviness, as well as preferred style.
Ok, so then it sounds like you are, in fact, using approximately the definition of rationality that I thought you were pointing at, as a threshold. In which case, I find that definition to be uninteresting and useless as a threshold. To be rational in the way you seem to be pointing to, you'd need to be able to implement something like Solomonoff induction over all possible hypotheses. In other words, you'd need hypercomputation, which as far as anyone knows is not achievable under our physics. No need to ask further questions about it, everyone who lacks that physically unattainable capability is going to make mistakes.
Another way to think about it: You might know that in Futurama, Santa judged everyone naughty and became omnicidal, or that in The Good Place, the standards for being good were so high that no one had gotten into heaven in centuries. Those fictional worlds made the same kind of mistake in judging morality, as I think you're making in judging rationality.
Since we're talking about reason at all, remember that at the end of the day "I don't know" and "no opinion" are verbal approximations of claiming a max entropy prior, which is almost never a person's true state of knowledge. Words are not precise enough to capture our full epistemic state, and we have limited mental precision to handle very small probabilities. In practice, what you have is limited brainpower to consider imprecise data. The useful question for judging others' reason isn't "Do they meet some a priori standard I've set?" It's "Is their reasoning useful for improving my epistemic state, or that of others?"
>So what exactly is the point of a career becoming expert in such questions, and being validated by the usual authorities as the best experts on them, if the world won’t listen to us about them?
I think you underestimate the power of economists. I think most people desperately love populists who promise short term fixes and intuitive solutions. If not for economists pushing back against ignorant masses, we'd be living in an even more over regulated hellscape with price controls everywhere.
No, really he doesn't. There are plenty of things almost all economists agree on, that are yet almost fully ignored by society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax for example. We tax income but not pollution, as if income generates a negative externality. That strikes me as borderline insane. Our society shows utter disregard to the most simple and logical economic policy recommendations. I have a dream where children screen-time is taxed. Do you think there's any chance I'll see it come true? Probability 0!
Even Pigou pushed back against Pigouvian taxation by the end of his career, because while it worked in theory choosing the appropriate level and maintaining it was practically impossible. I wouldn't quite say all economists agree on it.
Canada's introduced a carbon tax. People hate it. The government that introduced it is incredibly unpopular right(admittedly also for other reasons), and a slogan of the opposition is Axe the (carbon) Tax!
I agree that people opposed to carbon tax are dumb, but I think without economists pushing for it, it'd never get off the ground anywhere
... and the conclusion politicians are going to draw from it is: don't listen to economists. Even if you personally fully understand that they must be right, there's only costs and no benefits to anyone who listens to economists.
It’s interesting that Bryan Caplan attributes this problem, in part, to economic illiteracy, and simultaneously believes that the principal value of education is signaling.
There is no irony, dissonance, or inconsistency in holding both those positions simultaneously.
There is value in literacy, but most people think there is much greater value in being able to signal, and if they can so signal without being literate, then why bother any harder than one has to to get the credential?
Learning more true things - having 'literacy' about a subject - has value, both for the individual with possible personal gains he could capture and thus would be motivated to acquire, and as an externality that could improve the lives of other people by improving a society's overall quality of decision-making, though these gains are harder to capture and so pursued with lower motivation.
But these values are just not the ones that most people are trying to get when they attempt to acquire college degrees.
Most college students and employers of college graduates only care about a credential perceived to send an accurate signal of intelligence and conscientiousness. Given how important that is to improving their life prospects, the value of literacy pales in comparison. So they don't learn much in terms of long-term retention of academic knowledge and skills, and don't care that they don't learn much, and their employers also don't care.
So Bryan's right on both. Most people wrongly think bad policies are good (according to their own values) because they don't have enough basic econ background and reasoning ability to know better. That's bad.
What's worse is that even trying to remedy this deficiency by means of universal mandatory instruction in schools is unlikely to succeed, because most people won't learn anything with long-term retention unless they are strongly internally motivated or externally incentivized to learn it, and the education system as it is does not provide these incentives.
Mancur Olson suggested a dynamic theory in The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (old book, new release 2022).
Short version: Vested interests proliferate in times of peace. The longer the peace lasts the stronger they become, and the more they multiply. They represent veto points against change, plus help create layers upon layers of new regulations to serve their special interests. Therefore, nations decline the longer the peace lasts.
War upends this. When war arrives the obvious need to do whatever it takes to win the war overrides all other concerns, and vested interests disappear (or are severely weakened).
Then the war ends. The lack of strong vested interests in the beginning of the post-war period leads to a post-war boom. But as peace lasts longer, vested interests rise again, and decline sets in. It’s sort-of a cyclical theory. Rinse and repeat.
I am not sure the theory holds water. Olson was a creative maverick. But it is an interesting (dynamic) hypothesis. It deserves to be empirically tested more thoroughly than Olson could do when the book was published. (I have not read the new release, but Olson died in 1998 so I doubt the book contains any new or advanced empirical tests.)
Houses are both investment and consumer goods. Unlike normal goods their value (price) tends to rise over time, making it possible to earn a capital gain from the price increase. But they also provide goods and services as a place to live and store your personal property. Public corporations are similar to houses in that they too are both investments goods (through price increases in their shares) and consumer goods (they produce goods and services to meeting consumer goods. The creation of homes and the capital in corporations produced employment and economic growth.
Economic policy can favor one or the other view on the purpose of homes or corporations. For example, permitting stock buybacks after 1981, reducing top marginal tax rates and fighting inflation with high interest rates instead of taxes, created an environment that encouraged what I call shareholder primacy culture that prioritized consideration of business as an investment over an enterprise. The result in a financialization of the economy and rising economic inequality.
Alternately, if stock buybacks are not permitting it is harder for CEOs to directly boost shareholder value. And when high top marginal tax rates cap executive compensation they are not incented prioritize share price and so engage in more enterprise. Today 98.6% of the retained earnings on the S&P 500 over the past six years has been used for stock buybacks. What investment in enterprise that does happen, earnings a higher return than in the past. Before 1980, retained earnings were invested and earned lower returns but produced more economic benefits and jobs. Companies built stuff, including housing, and if they ran into NIMBYism they persuaded (maybe greased some palms) the relevant officials to see things their way, because they needed to engage in enterprise, invest their money, because the return on enterprise, though lower than today, was higher than that available in the financial markets.
Today, they can just choose not to build if their opposition and just buy financial assets or do stock buybacks. And so, after a century of real housing prices being range bound (as expected for a consumer good) home prices began to advance out of their historical range. Stock prices did the same at the same time (and for the same reason).
To answer your title question: It's the tragedy of the commons. What is good for many individuals (limiting development) is bad for society. That is the game being played here.
Fixing the problem will feel anti-democratic to a lot of people. Here in California the state passed a law known as "builder's remedy" that allows developers to ignore local zoning regulations in cities that aren't meeting building targets. This is predictably controversial and people are fighting like hell to get it watered down. These are the forces at work.
I am interested in how Texas manages with its limited zoning laws - and how localaties there restrict additional housing development - particularily higher density housing.
In general, localities rely heavily upon property taxes and have a very strong incentive to minimize moderate and low income housing - the tax income per person who will demand services is lower. And a lot of the value associated with high value housing is associated with the public perception of the 'quality' of the schools - which is primarily determined by the fraction of the students are the children of highly educated parents. Adding a significant fraction of students from less academically oriented families will reduce the public perception of the school 'quality' and reduce the value of the existing housing. So you have organizational resistance to new housing on the financial side and a very strong political resistance by existing residents.
> If the Bay Area and NYC deregulated housing the level of the typical U.S. city, the whole country’s GDP would rise by 14%. Optimistic estimate: … 36%.
Huge if true! Those are big numbers. Do you buy this?
"Note that Caplan’s favored explanations for US housing over-regulation, econ illiteracy, innumeracy, status quo bias, and paranoia, were all just as strong back in 1980, or in 1880, when this problem wasn’t nearly as bad. So they can’t be the full explanation for why things are worse. We have to wonder why we ever had better regulation long ago, if regulation naturally ends toward bad ends."
Wirth's law or the related Andy and Bill's law. "That what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away".
There was no better regulation in the past, just less, which is better. But since we have a bigger, more productive economy now, we can afford more cruft.
"So what exactly is the point of a career becoming expert in such questions, and being validated by the usual authorities as the best experts on them, if the world won’t listen to us about them?"
There are situations, however rare, when you need to take advice from someone. And even rarer still, that person is Ayn Rand when she yells at you:
"Action without thought is mindlessness, and thought without action is hypocritical."
Yes, thinking can be action, too and you are quite good at it. But that has limits. Without seeing your ideas implemented and tested at larger scale, that what you have convinced yourself of being true, will always be on a shaky epistemological foundation (and to hell with "authority" certifying you being the best expert, what do they know?). There comes a point, when building such expertise of thought becomes inherently hypocritical and you need to act instead. And if in order to act, you need the world to listen to you, but it refuses, then you do the next logical thing. Conquer it or die trying.
This is why a meritocratic governing system trumps a democratic system. Democratic politics is never about policy or principle, it is about staying in power. Pragmatic, efficient policy-making can only be done by highly qualified meritocrats with long term views and goals, the average person is not only unqualified to judge policy, but their tendency to vote with their emotional tribe rather than rationally, means they don't even vote for their own interests.
"We have to wonder why we ever had better regulation long ago, if regulation naturally ends toward bad ends."
Because in the past the public didn't have instant access to knowledge of everything their leaders were doing, and could only form opinions based on information transmitted through relatively narrow and (on average, comparatively) easily-controlled channels. Ability to organize, to punish officials based on uninformed nonsense opinions, was lower and more difficult. Plus, the state as a whole was smaller (because the country wouldn't have been able to support as much centralized bureaucracy) so there was much less onerous policy in general, and leaders could frequently move in ways the public would not much notice or react to.
I think small reframing is in order: we didn't have better regulation so much as less regulation; I make this distinction because while lots of people think 'same thing' it remains the case that the absence of regulation leaves open the addition of new regulations whenever circumstances align. This means that the option to build was always at risk because it lacked protections.
It feels to me like a winning play might be cities passing a General Building Code that repeals all other building regulations, and contains some package of much lighter restrictions and also *protections* for builders and landowners.
Until the recent YIMBY wins, I believe the reason for the bad regulatory environment is incompetent political action. With a few wins under their belt, I wonder if YIMBY groups might consider something like this as a strategy.
I'd say the straightforward explanation is regulation goes up, not down; the regulatory burden never gets smaller.
Because?
One possible answer: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uWmmIPKULzwBXfDSlGMJFMmrSSShJSeI/view
If we've been adding stuff for a million years, why is there any room left to add stuff now?
Regulations don't take up physical space. There's no "room" for them to run out of. They can, in theory, keep piling up until the society collapses. Maybe such piling up is what caused ancient societies to collapse (or get taken over by less sclerotic societies), and we're slowly headed toward another collapse.
Ah, then your answer is that regs do decline with civs collapse.
This seems to be the primary mechanism for deregulation historically. Increasing regulation until the burden is too great. Collapse of some kind, new leadership, gradually repeat the increase in regulation again.
The real trick is somehow achieving deregulation without the strife. Not many examples of that at scale so far, sadly.
See Mancur Olson: The Rise and Decline of Nations.
David is right about this. Think of how code tends to grow and grow until at some point you have to just dump the legacy implementation and write everything from scratch. If subtractive ideas were sought after and implemented it wouldn’t happen that way.
I've seen that in my own workplace with regard to SOPs we rewrote in conjuction with the in-house development and deployment of a new software system. We started with a very simple default sequence of procedures which set up a default flow that we thought would be good enough to get started and which should work 95٪ of the time, and which had its own kind of simplified internal logic and lexicon to describe certain states or activities with technical meanings distinct from the plain language interpretations but which everyone using the system would quickly learn to use to communicate with accuracy and precision.
We quickly ran into problems with needing to make exceptions, skip steps, do things in reverse in special cases, "Unless X, but not when Y, except when Z". Despite trying desperately to make people use the system as intended and not try to circumvent the rules, people constantly chafed at the burdens of doing things the proper way and used the exigency of their mission or leveraged their social network and organizational power to try and obtain special privileges and then use that as precedent to establish a new rule just for them or just for that mission type. Then others would find out and demand the same privileges or threaten to make accusations of unfairness, etc.
We attempted to record all this in so many revisions to the SOP that it became a kind of living document full of the equivalent of 'kludges upon kludges", as the basic outline continued to get "fleshed out" at length in fractal detail like a Westlaw outline or Restatement of Torts or something. We tried to see if we could somehow reformulate a new default model that could be a simple pattern with just a few exception rules that could capture most of the complexity of the evolving mess like some kind of attempt to do a factor analysis for possible best-fit abstractions, but it was almost immediately obvious that the whole effort was impossible and futile even if the dust had settled on the dynamic factors of people maneuvering to make new changes to the rules. We then thought that it would be best to "tighten things up" and look for the pattern-outlier exceptions which, if dropped, would give the biggest bang for the buck in terms of making a pattern for remainder more accurate in most cases. But by this point every single corner and edge case and exception existed because it had its own concentrated-interest constituency which would defend it to the death and make trouble and headaches for us and the leadership in the process. But even more contributing to the cementing inertia and entrenchment of the system in the grotesque form into which it had evolved was the small army of workers who were most responsible for administering and processing the systems activities and records, because they had all invested considerable time and effort in mastering the activity and terminology, had something akin to job security because they were far up a learning curve that had grown mountainous in size, and would resist any attempt whatsoever to make them have to go through the painful process of having to relearn what was in or out or, horrors, start over from scratch. So we just have learned to accept our fate and live with the monstrosity and related burdens and dysfunctions that are its consequence. Hey, it's a living.
This is quite deep.
the people with an interest in regulations have clear benefits. the people with interest in derugalition tend to be more distant from the benefits and the know-how to make it happen.
Because a legislator's job is to edited word with people; that's their raison d'etre. Laws never get taken off the books. The executive branch can pass laws now. Individual bills are illegibly long; in the 2010s we saw 775,734 new Federal Register pages, for an average of 77,573 pages added per year, no kidding.
Over 200K pages in the CFR; I hadn't realized it had gotten that bad, yikes.
Because no one tries to do otherwise, in a substantial and novel manner. We do not have the ability to try to do otherwise, or even think about trying to do otherwise. Humanity is trapped in a reality dome, largely of its own making.
One reason people might publicly support 'bad' regulation without being either ignorant or irrational is because they have valid expectations of even worse outcomes in the absence of the regulation, but they cannot explicitly articulate the logic behind these expectations without suffering severe social penalties. So they have to lie about the real reasons, in the language of some "socially acceptable excuse."
The SAE is often a position that is not well-supported by logic or evidence, but no one cares, because that's not the point. The point is to exchange the currency of tacit common knowledge with other socially savvy people who "get it" that the SAE is a cover story and a "hypocritical veto of last resort" when the genuine reason fully justifying a veto on other grounds is not able to be argued.
Someone is going to ask me to give an example of this for housing, but this is exactly the problem. The examples are socially undesirable taboos and liable to trigger negative emotions and volcanic passions that will derail the discussion and lead to a lot of ad hominem and premature rejection.
So instead I'll make up an example from a lighter subject and very much removed from our contemporary context.
There are a few movies such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Everything Is Illuminated in which dropping an American vegetarian into an Old World culture is used as an opportunity for culture-clash comic relief. In those two movies an Eastern European country is portrayed as somewhat backward and unenlightened as well as more uniform in tastes and (simple, primitive) moral sentiments. That is, where not only does everybody eat meat, but exaggerated into a caricature where they practically don't eat anything besides meat, have never ever heard of the idea of anyone voluntarily abstaining from meat out of ethical considerations, and literally cannot wrap their heads around the idea that such a person is in their company and not completely crazy.
Now, the vegetarian in such a situation may be rudely put on the spot to explain himself, but the moment he tries to do so, he realizes that it will take extreme amounts of effort to bridge the conceptual distance and that in the process of trying he may come off at superior or smug or contemptuous of his morally inferior and unenlightened hosts or risk breaching etiquette or causing serious offence for reasons he doesn't and should not be expected to know. That's why it's rude to put him on the spot, you should know he doesn't know the local etiquette and framework of sensitivities, and so insisting that he explain himself is like insisting that he walk through a minefield. Rude!
Now, realizing all this, the vegetarian needs a socially acceptable excuse. He cannot give the real reason without it being counterproductive. They won't get it at best, and they could also get offended and kick him out or worse. But if he doesn't give some kind of reason, they will keep insisting that he try the sausages and find it weird or insulting if he keeps refusing for no apparent reason. So he has to lie and give a fake reason. But it has to be the kind of reason that they will accept as the kind of thing that settled the matter, puts an end to the conversation and insistence, and allows for changing the subject.
A good example of a great socially acceptable excuse is to claim one has a medical condition. That is hard to verify, it's rude to express skepticism, and people want to signal to others around that they are compassionate and care and say, "Oh you poor baby!"
So the vegetarian says, "Oh, I'm allergic", or "I was bitten by a lone star tick and now I have Alpha-gal syndrome" or "I am getting a medical scan next week and the doctor says I can't eat meat until then!", or "I am taking a special medication and I have to keep my protein level below Y", or whatever.
This is the vegetarian's "hypocritical veto of last resort". It's not the truth, but it's also not the case that he doesn't have a valid, justifiable truth. It's just that he can't say what it is, in part because the people he would have to say it to are predictably not going to be fair or reasonable in their reaction to what he has to say. So he has to say something else which is his fallback contingency for how to accomplish his legitimate objective when the rules of his social milieu take the more honest ways off the table.
Having to use a hypocritical veto of last resort is a low-equilibrium not just because of the dishonesty but because in the honest equilibrium one might be willing to discuss, negotiate, and come to positive-sum compromises for superior regulations that are less likely to harm legitimate interests. But you can't negotiate trades when the things you want in exchange for your agreement are deemed to deplorable and illegitimate preferences.
In such circumstances one is forced to forgo these gains from trade and accept a lower level of welfare as the only way to defend those interests, as if they were acting in accordance with a right that the social rules said they were entitled to exercise without having to provide any public explanations or justifications whatsoever. in general, not being able to have certain honest discussions without exposing oneself to substantial social risks is a big reason behind, "This is why we can't have nice things."
Can you name any rational humans?
At least one of those words is underdefined in natural language. On any case there are humans at many different points along a spectrum that runs from "Holds opinions and takes actions that have no relationship to defineable goals or to any understanding of the physical world" to "Flawless superintelligence with maximally complete understanding of everything which it uses to always make globally optimal choices in service of fully well-defined goals."
Oh I agree!! Any candidate humans who I could run some of their writings through my standard checks?
No idea what your 'standard checks' are, but if you have the capability to test such a thing, then plausibly 'you' should be the first answer you come up with? I don't mean that as snark, I just mean that if you have enough confidence to make such a judgment, you can apply it to your own thoughts/writings/conclusions and adjust accordingly until you meet your own approval.
Otherwise: yes, I can think of some people, but not all public figures, and no one on whom I'd expect to find universal agreement. I think judging on writing depends a lot on tolerance for metaphor and abstraction and handwaviness, as well as preferred style.
> No idea what your 'standard checks' are...
Well, on Planet Earth you will find them classified under the category "Pedantry". It is a very clever trick, imagine if our entire world ran upon it.
>..but if you have the capability to test such a thing, then plausibly 'you' should be the first answer you come up with?
I believe there to be no such thing as a rational human, by the very definition of the term. On certain topics (most, as luck would have it), observing people declare their thinking *to be* [necessarily] rational is one of the very best places to find high quality evidence.
> ...if you have enough confidence to make such a judgment, you can apply it to your own thoughts/writings/conclusions and adjust accordingly until you meet your own approval.
I like this style of thinking very much, it should be applied everywhere.
> Otherwise: yes, I can think of some people, but not all public figures...
Please list a public figure who has speaking or writing online so I can see if I can detect any irrationality of any kind in their claims, explicit or implicit.
> I think judging on writing depends a lot on tolerance for metaphor and abstraction and handwaviness, as well as preferred style.
Indeed. And in addition to that: basing *judgment* (discernment, etc) on this sort of a foundation (as we do) is an effective means for a semi-conscious life form to trap itself in a Reality Dome of its own making, *forever*.
I don't mean that as snark, I just mean that if you have enough confidence to make such a judgment, you can apply it to your own thoughts/writings/conclusions and adjust accordingly until you meet your own approval.
Otherwise: yes, I can think of some people, but not all public figures, and no one on whom I'd expect to find universal agreement. I think judging on writing depends a lot on tolerance for metaphor and abstraction and handwaviness, as well as preferred style.
Ok, so then it sounds like you are, in fact, using approximately the definition of rationality that I thought you were pointing at, as a threshold. In which case, I find that definition to be uninteresting and useless as a threshold. To be rational in the way you seem to be pointing to, you'd need to be able to implement something like Solomonoff induction over all possible hypotheses. In other words, you'd need hypercomputation, which as far as anyone knows is not achievable under our physics. No need to ask further questions about it, everyone who lacks that physically unattainable capability is going to make mistakes.
Another way to think about it: You might know that in Futurama, Santa judged everyone naughty and became omnicidal, or that in The Good Place, the standards for being good were so high that no one had gotten into heaven in centuries. Those fictional worlds made the same kind of mistake in judging morality, as I think you're making in judging rationality.
Since we're talking about reason at all, remember that at the end of the day "I don't know" and "no opinion" are verbal approximations of claiming a max entropy prior, which is almost never a person's true state of knowledge. Words are not precise enough to capture our full epistemic state, and we have limited mental precision to handle very small probabilities. In practice, what you have is limited brainpower to consider imprecise data. The useful question for judging others' reason isn't "Do they meet some a priori standard I've set?" It's "Is their reasoning useful for improving my epistemic state, or that of others?"
>So what exactly is the point of a career becoming expert in such questions, and being validated by the usual authorities as the best experts on them, if the world won’t listen to us about them?
I think you underestimate the power of economists. I think most people desperately love populists who promise short term fixes and intuitive solutions. If not for economists pushing back against ignorant masses, we'd be living in an even more over regulated hellscape with price controls everywhere.
No, really he doesn't. There are plenty of things almost all economists agree on, that are yet almost fully ignored by society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax for example. We tax income but not pollution, as if income generates a negative externality. That strikes me as borderline insane. Our society shows utter disregard to the most simple and logical economic policy recommendations. I have a dream where children screen-time is taxed. Do you think there's any chance I'll see it come true? Probability 0!
Even Pigou pushed back against Pigouvian taxation by the end of his career, because while it worked in theory choosing the appropriate level and maintaining it was practically impossible. I wouldn't quite say all economists agree on it.
Canada's introduced a carbon tax. People hate it. The government that introduced it is incredibly unpopular right(admittedly also for other reasons), and a slogan of the opposition is Axe the (carbon) Tax!
I agree that people opposed to carbon tax are dumb, but I think without economists pushing for it, it'd never get off the ground anywhere
... and the conclusion politicians are going to draw from it is: don't listen to economists. Even if you personally fully understand that they must be right, there's only costs and no benefits to anyone who listens to economists.
As rare as it may be, some politicians do have a conscious and do the right thing even at the expense of their political career :)
And where would we be without soothsayers like you and economists I wonder 🤔
It’s interesting that Bryan Caplan attributes this problem, in part, to economic illiteracy, and simultaneously believes that the principal value of education is signaling.
There is no irony, dissonance, or inconsistency in holding both those positions simultaneously.
There is value in literacy, but most people think there is much greater value in being able to signal, and if they can so signal without being literate, then why bother any harder than one has to to get the credential?
Learning more true things - having 'literacy' about a subject - has value, both for the individual with possible personal gains he could capture and thus would be motivated to acquire, and as an externality that could improve the lives of other people by improving a society's overall quality of decision-making, though these gains are harder to capture and so pursued with lower motivation.
But these values are just not the ones that most people are trying to get when they attempt to acquire college degrees.
Most college students and employers of college graduates only care about a credential perceived to send an accurate signal of intelligence and conscientiousness. Given how important that is to improving their life prospects, the value of literacy pales in comparison. So they don't learn much in terms of long-term retention of academic knowledge and skills, and don't care that they don't learn much, and their employers also don't care.
So Bryan's right on both. Most people wrongly think bad policies are good (according to their own values) because they don't have enough basic econ background and reasoning ability to know better. That's bad.
What's worse is that even trying to remedy this deficiency by means of universal mandatory instruction in schools is unlikely to succeed, because most people won't learn anything with long-term retention unless they are strongly internally motivated or externally incentivized to learn it, and the education system as it is does not provide these incentives.
Good catch!
Mancur Olson suggested a dynamic theory in The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (old book, new release 2022).
Short version: Vested interests proliferate in times of peace. The longer the peace lasts the stronger they become, and the more they multiply. They represent veto points against change, plus help create layers upon layers of new regulations to serve their special interests. Therefore, nations decline the longer the peace lasts.
War upends this. When war arrives the obvious need to do whatever it takes to win the war overrides all other concerns, and vested interests disappear (or are severely weakened).
Then the war ends. The lack of strong vested interests in the beginning of the post-war period leads to a post-war boom. But as peace lasts longer, vested interests rise again, and decline sets in. It’s sort-of a cyclical theory. Rinse and repeat.
I am not sure the theory holds water. Olson was a creative maverick. But it is an interesting (dynamic) hypothesis. It deserves to be empirically tested more thoroughly than Olson could do when the book was published. (I have not read the new release, but Olson died in 1998 so I doubt the book contains any new or advanced empirical tests.)
Houses are both investment and consumer goods. Unlike normal goods their value (price) tends to rise over time, making it possible to earn a capital gain from the price increase. But they also provide goods and services as a place to live and store your personal property. Public corporations are similar to houses in that they too are both investments goods (through price increases in their shares) and consumer goods (they produce goods and services to meeting consumer goods. The creation of homes and the capital in corporations produced employment and economic growth.
Economic policy can favor one or the other view on the purpose of homes or corporations. For example, permitting stock buybacks after 1981, reducing top marginal tax rates and fighting inflation with high interest rates instead of taxes, created an environment that encouraged what I call shareholder primacy culture that prioritized consideration of business as an investment over an enterprise. The result in a financialization of the economy and rising economic inequality.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-capitalist-crisis
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-economic-culture-evolves
Alternately, if stock buybacks are not permitting it is harder for CEOs to directly boost shareholder value. And when high top marginal tax rates cap executive compensation they are not incented prioritize share price and so engage in more enterprise. Today 98.6% of the retained earnings on the S&P 500 over the past six years has been used for stock buybacks. What investment in enterprise that does happen, earnings a higher return than in the past. Before 1980, retained earnings were invested and earned lower returns but produced more economic benefits and jobs. Companies built stuff, including housing, and if they ran into NIMBYism they persuaded (maybe greased some palms) the relevant officials to see things their way, because they needed to engage in enterprise, invest their money, because the return on enterprise, though lower than today, was higher than that available in the financial markets.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/why-america-doesnt-build-things
Today, they can just choose not to build if their opposition and just buy financial assets or do stock buybacks. And so, after a century of real housing prices being range bound (as expected for a consumer good) home prices began to advance out of their historical range. Stock prices did the same at the same time (and for the same reason).
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-anomalies-drove-my-social-science#:~:text=Figure%203.%20Long%20terms%20trends%20in%20P/R%20and%20housing%20valuation
To answer your title question: It's the tragedy of the commons. What is good for many individuals (limiting development) is bad for society. That is the game being played here.
Fixing the problem will feel anti-democratic to a lot of people. Here in California the state passed a law known as "builder's remedy" that allows developers to ignore local zoning regulations in cities that aren't meeting building targets. This is predictably controversial and people are fighting like hell to get it watered down. These are the forces at work.
It's a clear pattern across all the anglosphere countries
Not anglosphere, global: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/11/29/these-are-the-worlds-most-expensive-cities
I am interested in how Texas manages with its limited zoning laws - and how localaties there restrict additional housing development - particularily higher density housing.
In general, localities rely heavily upon property taxes and have a very strong incentive to minimize moderate and low income housing - the tax income per person who will demand services is lower. And a lot of the value associated with high value housing is associated with the public perception of the 'quality' of the schools - which is primarily determined by the fraction of the students are the children of highly educated parents. Adding a significant fraction of students from less academically oriented families will reduce the public perception of the school 'quality' and reduce the value of the existing housing. So you have organizational resistance to new housing on the financial side and a very strong political resistance by existing residents.
> If the Bay Area and NYC deregulated housing the level of the typical U.S. city, the whole country’s GDP would rise by 14%. Optimistic estimate: … 36%.
Huge if true! Those are big numbers. Do you buy this?
yes
"Note that Caplan’s favored explanations for US housing over-regulation, econ illiteracy, innumeracy, status quo bias, and paranoia, were all just as strong back in 1980, or in 1880, when this problem wasn’t nearly as bad. So they can’t be the full explanation for why things are worse. We have to wonder why we ever had better regulation long ago, if regulation naturally ends toward bad ends."
Wirth's law or the related Andy and Bill's law. "That what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away".
There was no better regulation in the past, just less, which is better. But since we have a bigger, more productive economy now, we can afford more cruft.
"So what exactly is the point of a career becoming expert in such questions, and being validated by the usual authorities as the best experts on them, if the world won’t listen to us about them?"
There are situations, however rare, when you need to take advice from someone. And even rarer still, that person is Ayn Rand when she yells at you:
"Action without thought is mindlessness, and thought without action is hypocritical."
Yes, thinking can be action, too and you are quite good at it. But that has limits. Without seeing your ideas implemented and tested at larger scale, that what you have convinced yourself of being true, will always be on a shaky epistemological foundation (and to hell with "authority" certifying you being the best expert, what do they know?). There comes a point, when building such expertise of thought becomes inherently hypocritical and you need to act instead. And if in order to act, you need the world to listen to you, but it refuses, then you do the next logical thing. Conquer it or die trying.
You've got something better to do?
This is why a meritocratic governing system trumps a democratic system. Democratic politics is never about policy or principle, it is about staying in power. Pragmatic, efficient policy-making can only be done by highly qualified meritocrats with long term views and goals, the average person is not only unqualified to judge policy, but their tendency to vote with their emotional tribe rather than rationally, means they don't even vote for their own interests.
"We have to wonder why we ever had better regulation long ago, if regulation naturally ends toward bad ends."
Because in the past the public didn't have instant access to knowledge of everything their leaders were doing, and could only form opinions based on information transmitted through relatively narrow and (on average, comparatively) easily-controlled channels. Ability to organize, to punish officials based on uninformed nonsense opinions, was lower and more difficult. Plus, the state as a whole was smaller (because the country wouldn't have been able to support as much centralized bureaucracy) so there was much less onerous policy in general, and leaders could frequently move in ways the public would not much notice or react to.
I think small reframing is in order: we didn't have better regulation so much as less regulation; I make this distinction because while lots of people think 'same thing' it remains the case that the absence of regulation leaves open the addition of new regulations whenever circumstances align. This means that the option to build was always at risk because it lacked protections.
It feels to me like a winning play might be cities passing a General Building Code that repeals all other building regulations, and contains some package of much lighter restrictions and also *protections* for builders and landowners.
Until the recent YIMBY wins, I believe the reason for the bad regulatory environment is incompetent political action. With a few wins under their belt, I wonder if YIMBY groups might consider something like this as a strategy.
There are many reasons, here are three:
1. Our "democracies" are illusions.
2. Humans live in a state of perpetual Maya.
3. We have been taught to believe the opposite of 1 and 2 are true, thus we believe they are true.