> The value of some places is the very fact that they're low density.
Exactly. Just look at a satellite image of Atherton, CA or Lexington MA; they're low-density residential places with plenty of greenery where each lot is sizable and crucially, near major economic centers with plenty of high-paying jobs. They're desirable precisely because they allow you more breathing room while being geographically close to the hustle and bustle of a big city.
There is an interesting assumption here that is sadly codified into law. I.e that individuals' who desire the characteristics you describe are willing to pay more than the "true" value of the land if it were not protected by zoning.
We might never know what case is true because both scenarios can't exist at once. I think the closest we can get would actually be Brookline, MA in the same vein as your example of Lexington. There are dense clusters in the area as well as single family homes. One could potentially look at any plots converted from single family homes to apartments/condos to determine each individual's willingness to be located in that relatively sparse city.
This is an interesting way to frame something I've seen stated as "if you don't own the land you don't get to decide what to do with it". I can't say for certain if people would be willing to pay above "market" for more space in all areas, but I think they would in some.
Your comment is not part of this and is thoughtful, but it does touch on the anti-democratic streak present in the YIMBY/urbanist community. At its worst, this attitude is essentially "I know better what is good for this area than the people that live there" which has had disastrous consequences historically
I really appreciate this perspective. It’s important for people to live where they agree to common principles. In the end that’s why you choose to live where you live.
In some sense it cuts both ways. I’m more of the opinion that these areas are allowed to exist to the extent that the market allows them to exist. It’s obviously not desirable to have your neighbor sell of their house to someone who builds a 20 story apartment or something like that. But, if both you, your neighbor, and society as a whole can financially benefit from this fact, why prevent it from happening in a legal sense. Zoning only masks the true value of an area.
It’s strange, however, because I recognize the history of razing historic areas in the hopes of progress (see Paris’ Île de la Cité) and how invasive it is to have your home change because of one person selling out. I love old buildings and often marvel at how quaint and peaceful these areas can be. I don’t want them to be lost and I want future generations to experience the same emotions I feel when looking at these areas.
Ultimately, I think it would be beneficial just to have an idea of how land could be used for purposes other than what it is currently zoned for. Obfuscation of the price of a piece of land due to zoning is, in my opinion, more detrimental than helpful.
> This is an interesting way to frame something I've seen stated as "if you don't own the land you don't get to decide what to do with it".
How about “if you cannot afford to defend the land, you do not get to decide what to do with it”?
Who is paying for all the police/military/courts/legal system keeping that highly desirable land secure from “outsiders”?
Land owners in the US have an enormous subsidy from non land owners simply by being able to secure their asset without commensurate payment for security, and doubly so in California with their prop 13 property tax increase cap.
It's not really possible to determine this because it's a prisoner's dilemma of sorts.
If I have 50 neighbours with no zoning rules, 49 of them stay put, but one sells up to a developer, the 49 who chose not to sell now have to live with the additional density, while the one family that sold up "wins" and moves elsewhere with their stacks of cash.
Without zoning, or planning permission, or _some_ way of the locals preventing land use changes in this way, you eventually end up surrounded by tower blocks.
Your society would be doomed to forever look back at historical grievances and never make progress.
As Ibram X. Kendi says: "The only remedy to past
discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." Under your and his vision, there will never come a day when people aren't discriminated for things they had no control over.
I think it is probably unwise to pre-suppose an extreme here (that society will never "progress").
The default action today is "do nothing and don't acknowledge the problem." Suggesting any action be taken against that status quo does not in any way suggest that it is a permanent inviolable law that society must continuously optimize for nor does it suggest that it can't be done in tandem with other "progress" society may achieve.
> The default action today is "do nothing and don't acknowledge the problem."
Ambivalence is the human default, and logic requires it must be so. The world presently has 10e9 people. Historically, something like 10e12 people have ever existed (I'm estimating). If you were to somehow feel the sum total of human suffering in just one instant, I daresay it would destroy you. We ALL pick and choose what suffering to acknowledge, for the simple reason that to do otherwise is impossible (and deadly if it was possible). Heck, we ignore entire categories of suffering in every discussion, like that caused by disease, heart-break, ostracism, bullying, or old age.
You loudly proclaim your aversion to all human suffering, past and present, and claim to know how to fix it. This is absurd. It is vain virtue signaling. Your position smacks of an ignorant pride, wrapped in a claim of impossible compassion. And this sin of pride extends to your "solutions" - you assert that you can accurately assess the suffering of all humans throughout history and take just action to make it right. That's even more absurd.
We can't address ALL suffering. That doesn't mean that we can't address ANY suffering. It means we must (must!) be highly selective. We must let (almost) everything go. We deal with what's in front of us. We must acknowledge how human life is twisted: Rape and plunder...that yields good kids. Civilizations collapse...to make new for the next one. Rampant exploitation...that yields just and fair societies. Cultural appropriation...that yields great ideas and art. Slavery and dehumanization...that ultimately leaves the descendants in a better position than the descendants of those that weren't taken. It's twisted, messed up, and that's life. (btw the most twisted thing I know of in nature is the life-cycle of this slime-mold/ameoba life cycle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlANF-v9lb0).
Yeah, there are plenty of structures that need to be dismantled in the US. The police are out-of-control and there is no meaningful separation of powers at the local level; the health-care system is plundering us all for profit; wealth inequality continues to get worse; money in politics has ossified our power structures. And yeah, America has a profound and unique history of racist dehumanization rooted in southern slavery that continues to this day and negatively impacts many American black people in profound ways. But the solution to the KKK (the original recipe anti-black version) is not to invent a ~KKK (the crispy anti-white version) and tell whites that if they don't join ~KKK then they are in the KKK. That's just fucked up.
> The world presently has 10e9 people. Historically, something like 10e12 people have ever existed (I'm estimating).
Tangential, and doesn't detract much from your well-defended point, but the percentage of people alive today is probably much higher than your estimate. The population has gone up so fast in recent years that the total number of people who have ever lived is closer to 10x current population than 1000x:
Given a current global population of about 8 billion, the estimated 117 billion total births means that those alive in 2022 represent nearly 7% of the total number of people who have ever lived
Look I'm not exactly engaged enough to dismantle this piece by piece so this will probably be my last comment but:
> Ambivalence is the human default, and logic requires it must be so.
You'd do well to do more than assert it. This is ideology.
> You loudly proclaim your aversion to all human suffering, past and present, and claim to know how to fix it.
I said no such thing, and the remainder of your prior statements are also asserting I made any such claim. Making efforts to fix wrongs is not itself a moral failure, nor is it some kind of foolish pride.
> We can't address ALL suffering. That doesn't mean that we can't address ANY suffering.
What is odd to me is that this is exactly my point. If you somehow think that racism isn't still "in front of us" as you so boldly claim, I encourage you to prove that substantially and convince the people who to this day still feel victimized by it.
> But the solution to the KKK (the original recipe anti-black version) is not to invent a ~KKK (the crispy anti-white version) and tell whites that if they don't join ~KKK then they are in the KKK.
I haven't claimed this at all. For what its worth though — you are in some form invoking the paradox of intolerance here. I'm not sure why you felt the need to write this screed, it is entirely separate from anything I've said and completely off-the-rails.
You may be right - I suppose that apart from my first point about ambivalence being the default, it doesn't necessarily apply to you personally. But it does apply to the general ideology this thread is addressing. I'm sorry if I grouped you in with views that you don't share.
> Or weren't given access to the same loans (including federally subsidized loans)
I'm not sure which time period you're talking about, but if it's the Boston Fed 1992 research on mortgage loans, then it has had legitimate academic challenges to its methodology.
> So as a white male, when you inherit your parent's house
The same advantage goes to a black male who inherits his parent's house, and the same disadvantage to anyone of any color who did not inherit a house.
> where most research has been done for white ethnicities
The US was nearly 90% white as recently as 1960, and was 75% white as of the 2000 census, so of course most research that has been done in the past was done with white research subjects.
Ultimately, nobody serious rejects the fact that there was past de jure racial discrimination against blacks in this country. What many people challenge is the notion that present de jure discrimination is the only way to remedy past de jure discrimination.
> I'm not sure which time period you're talking about, but if it's the Boston Fed 1992 research on mortgage loans, then it has had legitimate academic challenges to its methodology.
> The same advantage goes to a black male who inherits his parent's house, and the same disadvantage to anyone of any color who did not inherit a house.
Of course, and any difference in equity associated with the house. Around 75% of whites own a home versus 45% of blacks. And as you know -- homeownership is the single largest source of wealth for most people in the US.
> The US was nearly 90% white as recently as 1960, and was 75% white as of the 2000 census, so of course most research that has been done in the past was done with white research subjects.
> Ultimately, nobody serious rejects the fact that there was past de jure racial discrimination against blacks in this country. What many people challenge is the notion that present de jure discrimination is the only way to remedy past de jure discrimination.
The person I was responding to seemed to be making that assertion. And I never said that discrimination was the only way to remedy past discrimination.
The part that's disheartening is that so many people are so up in arms about affirmative action -- and how its discriminatory. But consider everything else we discussed (and there's a lot more) as having no real impact. I mean, why are we even talking about it...
> Both are parts of who I am and neither deserves shame or uplifting.
This is a good point. I've always thought that my esteem of anybody should not change based on immutable characteristics of that person, or other factors that they had no material choice in being.
> if we follow the meritocratic ideology that everyone has the same opportunities available to them, it would be a natural conclusion
It's a natural-sounding conclusion that has no evidentiary basis in reality. Different cultural and ethnic groups value and specialize in different things, which over generations make for significant differences in the average member of those groups.
This is one of the biggest fallacies when it comes to policies that incorporate preferences based on racial, gender, or whatever other demographic basis you can think of: that absent biases (or "structures of oppression" or what have you), each and every subsection of society will reflect the composition of the whole more or less perfectly.
Asians are 6.3% of the US population yet comprise only 0.1% of the NFL (literally a handful of players among 1500+ in the active roster). Is it because football racially discriminates against Asians? No, it's because Asians as a whole are not very interested in being professional football players. There's nothing that stops the odd individual of Asian descent from making it to the NFL.
Women are roughly half of the population yet comprise only 13% of taxicab drivers. Is there a taxicab union that's preventing women from joining? No, on the whole women aren't very interested in being taxicab drivers. There's nothing that stops the odd woman from being one, though.
So on and so forth for literally every slice of life you can think of; you will never find anything that reflects the demographics of the underlying society. Hell, even the demographics of the 50 states don't reflect the demographics of the country as a whole. Vermont is only 1.5% black, whereas Alabama is nearly 30% black. By that metric, Vermont would be 20x as discriminatory against black people, wouldn't it?
> So on and so forth for literally every slice of life you can think of; you will never find anything that reflects the demographics of the underlying society.
Aside from discrimination built into the slices of life, sure.
To use your NFL example, a pull quote from a 2022 Yahoo article: "Those who did come faced virulent racism and discrimination". There's a number of articles on Google under the search "nfl discrimination against asians" which show the same thing.
This can be repeated with similar results for all of the other examples you've brought up as well.
And when there's discrimination happening in the workforce, it can't be used to say "this is the natural balance of [attribute] in the workforce".
Can you take the smallest slice, "people who are literally exactly you" and find no preferences that can't be attributed to discriminatory experiences?
To have complete equality of outcome between ethnic groups would surely involve homogenisation of their cultures. That sounds totalitarian as hell if you ask me.
> a more honest appraisal about what the real obstacles are for Black and Hispanic students
Different cultural and ethnic groups value different things. Virtually nobody who clamors for more black and Hispanic representation in Harvard's undergrad class, for example, also clamors for more Asian representation in the NFL, even though that disparity is much, much greater, with only a single-digit number of current players.
Why would you look for other signals when race in this example was the signal used for discrimination?
Suppose you use income. There are more poor white people than black people period. You could certainly help them instead of any black person. That may be more optimal depending on what your goal is, but if the goal was to combats racial inequality clearly that’s not useful.
Ha, good one! One can only hope the Elbonian Parliament will have the sense to abolish this stupid Xtremesunshine time and observe one time zone year-round.
I did not make that assumption, with the idea that in countries with free (or freer, at any rate) market-based economies with little to no capital controls, the rising tide lifts all boats, including those of the proletariat without capital, to a standard of living higher than countries with unfree economies and significant capital controls.
In fact, in two of the countries that presently have significant capital controls (China and Russia), even your human capital is controlled with internal passports that limit where in your own country you can move to.
Of course, I likewise don't dispute that I don't know what your preferences are. My original statement ("you likely wouldn't want to") was intended to be a general statement, not for you in particular as an individual.
According to your first source, "cutting the top tax rate does not lead to economic growth" but it does not lead to economic stagnation or shrinkage either; "cutting the top tax rate does not lead to income growth" but does not lead to income decrease either; "cutting the top tax rate does not lead to wage growth" but does not lead to wage decrease either; "cutting the top tax rate does not lead to job creation" but does not lead to job destruction either. That is to say, cutting the top tax rate has no correlation with any of those four items.
So if taking more or less taxes from the rich results in no meaningful difference in ordinary American lives, shouldn't the government then default to taking less? The other way would be just wasteful. And if your argument is that no, in fact the additional tax revenue from the rich is helpful because it funds various redistributive social programs, then my counterargument is that what those programs seem to be most effective at is incentivizing creating an unemployable underclass at the taxpayer's expense[0] while enriching politically connected players.
[0]: See Thomas Sowell's extensive body of research on the general welfare of black Americans before and after the Great Society programs of the 60s.
So clearly you don't see the usefulness of government being able to spend money on programs that do make a difference, even going as far as to label it wasteful. I'd argue that letting people keep money that makes no significant difference in their life, other than sitting as a number on a bank account, is wasteful. If people can use money to better society, so can government, difference being government can spend money selflessly.
Government spending, in certain cases, can and is wasteful. To claim that all is, is clearly false.
I'd be wary of quoting Thomas Sowell, he's basically the guy to victim blame minorities into saying that being poor is their fault.
"Selflessly" insofar as everyone involved has no incentives, internal or external, that direct their behavior one way or another; which is to say, not selflessly at all.
The government isn't a machine that takes action for the good of the citizens with no feeling. It's a messy organization composed of people who are all looking out for their salaries, what makes their boss look good or their rivals look bad, whether they win the next election, and maybe sometimes the stated mission of the organization or the good of the citizens. And moreover, it does all that with the might of the law, the monopoly on violence.
If it's a similar amount of money for a similar level of outcome, I'd much rather the people use the money to better society and not government, for those reasons.
> Thomas Sowell, he's basically the guy to victim blame minorities into saying that being poor is their fault
What a demeaning way to describe a human being with an incredible personal story and his life's work. And it's wrong, too: if you simplify into a sentence or two what he says about minorities (and his body of work extends far beyond that), it's that well-meaning government policies often incentivize minorities into entering cycles of poverty, and that minorities should depend on themselves first and foremost and not the government to improve their lot.
Exactly. Just look at a satellite image of Atherton, CA or Lexington MA; they're low-density residential places with plenty of greenery where each lot is sizable and crucially, near major economic centers with plenty of high-paying jobs. They're desirable precisely because they allow you more breathing room while being geographically close to the hustle and bustle of a big city.