Bring back Corruption! For all its many many flaws, corrupt systems with cozy collusions between developers and the people in power have the advantage that they essentially sidestep the whole judicial system altogether and provide certainties to those developers to where they can actually do projects. This is probably why Chicago has cheap housing for example.
In the case of Chicago at least, I agree that the corruption creates a somewhat well functioning system for development.
For those unaware, Chicago is divided into 50 wards, each of which elects an alderman. By a longstanding custom called aldermanic privilege, each alderman has effectively complete authority over what developments can happen in their district.
For each project, the alderman balances two things to decide whether to approve it:
A) how much the neighbors complain (height, traffic, etc are common concerns)
B) how much the developer is willing to bribe them (sometimes with subtlety, sometimes brazenly)
This is corrupt of course, but it also approximates a comprehensive cost-benefit decision process. The result is that basically all reasonable projects get approved, sometimes with concessions on things like height or traffic.
Bring back? Bring back? But the mission is already accomplished! You underestimated the Yankee can-do spirit. Our new slogan is actually "Make America Corrupt Again." And here's our new fight song; you already know the tune:
"My Bounty lies over the ocean
My Bounty lies over the sea
Bring back, bring back
Oh, bring back my Greenland to me!"
We literally just elected the 1,000% most corrupt administration in, like, ever, run by a man who thinks government is a game of Monopoly. So naturally it's going great great great again...as in "How to crash a plane in just 3 easy lessons" great:
Lesson 1. Skip the flying lessons.
Lesson 2. Forget the checklist.
Lesson 3. Assume you are a great pilot.
Bonus points for ignoring the weather.
I dunno, maybe corruption is not what it claims to be? Or not what it used to be? Or never was?
It isn't April 1st yet, is it?
Excuse me, I was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the mayor was once Phineas Taylor Barnum. Yes, P.T. "There's a sucker born every minute" Barnum. More than a little bit Trumpy! So this corruption scheme makes me a little dubious.
Actually, Barnum was considered a decent Mayor. Who woulda thought it?
In a former life I covered local politics for my town newspaper. That meant covering ordinary people who were given power. What do you think happened?
–Angry people with signs would periodically show up for our town council meetings. We could never figure out whether to call them "outraged citizens" or a "pressure group."
–I once listened in can-you-believe-this dumbstruck fascination as town legislators spent a whole hour trying to define "dust." Personally, I think they should have stuck to "pornography."
–The town cranks would reliably show up with their alternative reality schemes to make it all better.
That was the making of the democracy sausage. Local governments here are always in danger of being controlled by the contractors, or the unions, or the taxpayers, or the party bosses. But seldom by common sense.
Our national government was originally based to a large extent on slavery and expropriation, so we are reverting to form here. I grew up a half mile from the smallest Indian "reservation" in the United States, all of a quarter acre. Not sure how big that is in British...how you say "small" over there? Let's just say, it started out much bigger. Point is, "reservation" is the polite word for what was left after the whites just took as much land as they wanted to.
We still have freedom of speech here, for now, so I am going to use the right word: stole.
Wonder how many pieces they can carve Greenland into? Follow the money...that's the breadcrumb trail leading to the crime scenes. At least the Icelandic people got to do this to themselves, like a circular firing squad, which saved on bullets.
How about the case of Panama? S.I. Hayakawa famously said "We stole it fair and square." Yes, that would be the Hayakawa of General Semantics, promoters of "The map is not the territory" Korzybski.
Evidently the "map" of Panama is does not even refer to a 'territory," merely a negotiating position. Nice little imaginary country you got there.
Get this: prior to his famous quote, Hayakawa, a native-born Canadian of Japanese descent, had to petition the Canadian government to get the right to vote for his people...and he failed. Later, he moved to the United States, where we all have the right to vote, for now. Now, all it takes is a Sharpie to make you a citizen, or not. No metaphysical anguish at all.
Politics makes strange bedfellows, doesn't it? And history, making fun of us, tends toward repetition.
Human nature is not actually that hard to figure out. Just watch people in action, you'll get it!
So: my position is that the territory IS the map, until I am convinced otherwise.
And maybe there is a Corruption 2.0 that is better than the old one, but I will believe it when I see it, if then. Even so, I'll bet that just a little would go a long way, kind of like a virus in a vaccine. Or a Kennedy.
Or cynicism.
By the way, ignore that little "Whoopsie" we just had about the so-called war plans...and try not to think of that movie "Dr. Strangelove," it was just a satire, so what. Personally, I think we should hire these guys instead:
It sounds like you want something with the legitimacy of courts, but far more speed, expertise, and certainty. I know enough about the history of US administrative law to know that this describes agencies back before the 1960's, when suing agencies displaced baseball as the national sport. In this respect, in the US, the Great Society killed the New Deal, especially when the better-funded political right created its own litigation shops.
It's easy enough for a legislature to make agency actions unreviewable. That might help speed and certainty. But it won't do wonders for legitimacy. And as far as expertise goes, civil servants are badly underpaid everywhere but Singapore, AFAIK. Back in the day, a fresh associate at Cravath would make half again a fresh government lawyer. Now, it's more like six- or eight-fold.
I think it is more a change in the relationship between existing institutions that I'm looking for than any new institution. In particular, a more porous, two-way relationship between the public and private sector, probably facilliated by more use of secondments in both directions. In the white paper we call this "corporatism" on the European model. Obviously it has its own failure mode, but I think that "regulatory capture" might also be an outdated concept.
Are there any good examples of societies that work, compared to the US? Or where at least SOME things are working that we could learn from? Am thinking of Scandinavia, where they seem to have actually on how to have a government that works for the populace. Finland re-thinking the school system comes to mind, as an example. We haven't fundamentally re-thought "government" in the US in a long time. But we did re-think "business." Now it is "all about the shareholders!" "Making money with money." My friends and family in Canada and Sweden think the US is crazy right now, and I agree. We take everything to extremes. Sweeten the pot with social media, and you have quite a brew. Right now, trust and affordability seem at an all-time low here. The road to hell was paved by being unable to see the consequences of our actions, plus self interest. If only Thatcher was right and we didn't have a society at all, then we could just get rid of the bad apples. Trump fixed the ice rink in Central Park, but breaks everything else he touches. We don't have a government, we have a personality cult. And Musk has no theory of government, he just hates it, except when he gets money from it. Maybe our first principle has always to be living in reality. But people don't know it when they aren't.
China works fairly well and their big thing used to be local autonomy - they would give mayors pretty much carte blanche and a blank check to do whatever they wanted.
That's close to how central banks roll these days. Especially during financial crises, when a lot of good bankers need work that looks good on their resume, and the central banks need good bankers.
FWIW my own experience of working for Lend Lease in 2011 was that demand & predictability were the most important issues for property investment firms. I watched a lot of grown men close to tears as their plans were shredded by the man now given responsibility for managing the Crown Estate, but I never heard anything about NIMBYs. That was just a cost of doing business. These companies have a pipeline of consented sites that will keep them going for decades. That’s not the problem - the problem is can they let/sell these assets & can they rely on gov policy to stay the same over the lifecycle of the build / rent / sale?
Personally, I think there’s some kind of mash-up of Sam Bowman, D Cummings ideas that can get this stuff to happen. We need multi year development strategies that don’t get messed around by incoming govs. We need infrastructure spend to sit outside the Treasury so it doesn’t have to fight the OBR’s spreadsheet fiddlers. And we need to start small & modular to build public (& bond market) trust. Big stuff should wait until we have rebuilt organisational knowhow & skills to deliver. I think if we can offer guaranteed yields, no political to & fro & a rapid action public sector task force to drive it, we might be able to kickstart industrial growth. My own suggestion (which is regularly kicked to the ground) is to use a SWF. Capitalise it with some public asset then drive pension money into it for a guaranteed return. The SWF sits outside Treasury / reach of bond markets & can have cross-political, multi year buy-in. It has its own task force - driven, highly skilled public servants - who kick down doors & make stuff happen. And where is the public consent? Well it could produce a citizen dividend when in surplus. You could also provide a better, honest version of Musk’s doge dashboard - ie clear reporting on goals > spend > outcomes so that people see tangible delivery not just opaque 3rd hand reporting that doesn’t appear to improve their lives.
I just read your essay at Niskanen. Sounds like the problem is essentially risk aversion, which is all over the culture. Institutions must please the public, individuals, and anyone who could have any interest in the outcome no matter how small. "Safety" culture.
No wonder they become risk averse.
Our expectations have metastasized, like our cars.
Actually we no longer want (or are offered) mere cars, we get so-called "Sport Utility Vehicles," which are neither sporty nor utilitarian. Luxury on the inside, a shell keeping the outside world away on the outside.
Sorta like the Space Shuttle: more expensive and more dangerous than what it replaced, thereby negating its very purpose. But it did meet the needs of NASA, an agency that found itself without a mission, and its contractors.
We must be in a perverse feedback loop, where the very things we do to improve things make them worse.
Funny how utilitarianism, like effective altruism, are mental models that don't even work very well. Never mind that idea that markets "just work!"
You didn't mention the extreme individualism in the Anglosphere, or at least in the USA, so I will. How can collective problems be solved one person at a time? That whole forest and tree thing.
It isn't just construction, we can't do anything, anywhere. Boeing forgot how to build jets (or rockets), regulations and parents (and now DOGE) have the schools playing defense...you name an Institution.
Plus, Covid.
I drove through a big intersection near me yesterday. and it suddenly became gridlocked. How's that for a mental model of where we are? Two many actors, each seeking their own ends, driving into one limited space, and filling it, so then no one can move.
Too many expectations colliding with each other. American want it all. We've got powerful attractors like LUXURY and STATUS and ME that put us in a trance. They are the magnets, we are the iron filings. We got what we wanted...but not completely, since our wants are contradictory, and infinite. No "thing" ever satisfies us.
Any successful society or government is going to have to persuade people that they will be better off if they throttle back on their personal desires and think of the big picture. But "You can't always get what you want" is more Thatcher than Trump. We desire everything, all the time, now. The rest flows downstream from that. I realize that clever designers, like political leaders, can help keep the traffic flowing, sometimes.
Do mental models ever get so big they collapse under their own weight?
Or do we personally get unbalanced, and spend too much time looking at the models? Are we like meteorologists that stare at the computer screens, and miss the storms clouds right outside the window?
"I do think there’s far too much emphasis on housebuilding and homeownership, and that (not coincidentally) there are a lot of very wrong theories of real estate economics"
I am not clear what exactly you disagree with.
Is it "housebuilding" because we could build more dense residences flats, or we don't even need to build more shelter?
Is it "homeownership" because public housing, rentals, etc, may offer better solutions to providing shelter? Zurich, Switzerland is almost all rentals. Was Thatcherism and "owning your own home" a major part of the problem?
Historically, the UK cleared slums but built Corbusier-inspired blocks of flats that proved awful. Where land is expensive, ugly houses were built almost next to each other, such as around Canary Wharf. Similar monstrosities were built in California's Silicon Valley - "zero lot" houses.
Whatever happened to quality mid-rise flats built well rather than cheaply? I do wonder about British builders after the Grenfell disaster. the many poorly built buildings that have saddled owners with unsaleable properties. I recall a UK documentary (1080s?) showing that Wimpey's homes built with wood frames and clad in a single brick skin had the wood frames lying on wet ground and likely to rot. What was the company thinking - that British weather was like the US West? [The quality of homes in California has followed the build 'em cheap and sell 'em high. Custom home quality in the materials & joinery has degraded significantly over the last century.]
"You can’t do Thatcherism without an oil boom, you can’t do Blairism without a financial bubble"
b/w
"Are you any closer to being able to incorporate a theory of power? Nope"
Are you sure you aren't? Theories of power can be, generally should be, very simple. In these two examples, competitive pressures pushed the development of new technologies while policymakers tried (and failed) to hold together the political coalitions that were formed under the status quo ante production system. Growth booms provide new opportunities for coalition-building by eliminating the status quo (or reducing the power of its bias).
So your theory of power is structural and comes from Lindblom (Politics and Markets) in combination with Chwieroth/Walter (democratic publics have increasing expectations of their governments' ability to produce excellent economic outcomes, probably because the majority are asset-owners now). This provides fertile ground for anti-system/pro-corporate candidates and parties (Lipset and Hooghe and Marks), and the search for political tactics that can bust up status quo structures through the weaponization of those structures for things other than their intended usage (MMT, hard monetarism, various forms of revolution, trillion-dollar coins, a return to McKinleyian tariffs and imperialism, people are throwing all kinds of shit out there these days).
The cybernetics challenge then becomes channeling the Chwieroth/Walter expectations through the Lindblomian structures.
I.e., what did Biden do wrong? Thought he had a deflationary environment to go full FDR [meet expectations] when he didn't [crashed into Lindblom's market structure]. What did Lina Khan do wrong? Used anti-trust to go after future-looking companies, on the basis that they previously controlled already-obsolete technologies. That ship had sailed, they took the wrong lesson from the Microsoft case (Netscape ain't thriving today, altho Mozilla still has a niche).
I took a look at your niskanen summary article, and it's hard to read that and not think of that whole "elite overproduction" thesis. While I was always a bit skeptical of it as a model of power struggle, it does seem to coincide somewhat with your model of too many professionals who are incentivized to justify their existence more so than actually make things happen. But I guess you're pointing out that this is uniquely Anglophone - it's not like they don't have lots of lawyers and consultants in like Korea or Germany or whatever. Hmm...
"derisking infrastructure projects so that the planning risk is below the threshold of acceptability"
After they commit sibstantial resources to actual building, private sector developers want planning risk at zero, but before that they like it to be quite high (or appear/be so to everyone else, if we're not being all EMH about that possibility).
Planning risk/uncertainty is after all what keeps the price of unpermitted land low and allows advantages in risk-assessment, legal resource, 'influence', diversification, time preference etc to yield massive capital gains in banked land.
2) It seems to me that the current interest in abundance is about updating our basic institutions from their 19th century roots to the 20th century. And you may be right about cybernetics as the way to do. At the very least, yes, cybernetics, requisite variety and all that.
But I'm not sure it's adequate to the challenge of AI. Perhaps the economic side of it, perhaps. But AI is, after all, fundamentally a mind technology. I don't think Homo economicus is up to that. We need to think more seriously about Homo ludens, something I've started exploring: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/03/homo-economicus-sucks-homo-ludens-rocks.html
3) The philosopher Paul Feyerabend wrote of abundance late in his career. His was a more metaphysical concept, about the nature of reality. There's always more more more, the real is endless, while we're always trying to reduce and contain it. I've got a post about that: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/10/fecundity-and-implementation-in-complex.html
Bring back Corruption! For all its many many flaws, corrupt systems with cozy collusions between developers and the people in power have the advantage that they essentially sidestep the whole judicial system altogether and provide certainties to those developers to where they can actually do projects. This is probably why Chicago has cheap housing for example.
that might be putting it a bit too strongly! but something like a cozy European corporatism, yes.
In the case of Chicago at least, I agree that the corruption creates a somewhat well functioning system for development.
For those unaware, Chicago is divided into 50 wards, each of which elects an alderman. By a longstanding custom called aldermanic privilege, each alderman has effectively complete authority over what developments can happen in their district.
For each project, the alderman balances two things to decide whether to approve it:
A) how much the neighbors complain (height, traffic, etc are common concerns)
B) how much the developer is willing to bribe them (sometimes with subtlety, sometimes brazenly)
This is corrupt of course, but it also approximates a comprehensive cost-benefit decision process. The result is that basically all reasonable projects get approved, sometimes with concessions on things like height or traffic.
"This is probably why Chicago has cheap housing for example."
What is? Is it? Does it?
Bring back? Bring back? But the mission is already accomplished! You underestimated the Yankee can-do spirit. Our new slogan is actually "Make America Corrupt Again." And here's our new fight song; you already know the tune:
"My Bounty lies over the ocean
My Bounty lies over the sea
Bring back, bring back
Oh, bring back my Greenland to me!"
We literally just elected the 1,000% most corrupt administration in, like, ever, run by a man who thinks government is a game of Monopoly. So naturally it's going great great great again...as in "How to crash a plane in just 3 easy lessons" great:
Lesson 1. Skip the flying lessons.
Lesson 2. Forget the checklist.
Lesson 3. Assume you are a great pilot.
Bonus points for ignoring the weather.
I dunno, maybe corruption is not what it claims to be? Or not what it used to be? Or never was?
It isn't April 1st yet, is it?
Excuse me, I was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the mayor was once Phineas Taylor Barnum. Yes, P.T. "There's a sucker born every minute" Barnum. More than a little bit Trumpy! So this corruption scheme makes me a little dubious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum
Actually, Barnum was considered a decent Mayor. Who woulda thought it?
In a former life I covered local politics for my town newspaper. That meant covering ordinary people who were given power. What do you think happened?
–Angry people with signs would periodically show up for our town council meetings. We could never figure out whether to call them "outraged citizens" or a "pressure group."
–I once listened in can-you-believe-this dumbstruck fascination as town legislators spent a whole hour trying to define "dust." Personally, I think they should have stuck to "pornography."
–The town cranks would reliably show up with their alternative reality schemes to make it all better.
That was the making of the democracy sausage. Local governments here are always in danger of being controlled by the contractors, or the unions, or the taxpayers, or the party bosses. But seldom by common sense.
Our national government was originally based to a large extent on slavery and expropriation, so we are reverting to form here. I grew up a half mile from the smallest Indian "reservation" in the United States, all of a quarter acre. Not sure how big that is in British...how you say "small" over there? Let's just say, it started out much bigger. Point is, "reservation" is the polite word for what was left after the whites just took as much land as they wanted to.
We still have freedom of speech here, for now, so I am going to use the right word: stole.
Wonder how many pieces they can carve Greenland into? Follow the money...that's the breadcrumb trail leading to the crime scenes. At least the Icelandic people got to do this to themselves, like a circular firing squad, which saved on bullets.
How about the case of Panama? S.I. Hayakawa famously said "We stole it fair and square." Yes, that would be the Hayakawa of General Semantics, promoters of "The map is not the territory" Korzybski.
Evidently the "map" of Panama is does not even refer to a 'territory," merely a negotiating position. Nice little imaginary country you got there.
Get this: prior to his famous quote, Hayakawa, a native-born Canadian of Japanese descent, had to petition the Canadian government to get the right to vote for his people...and he failed. Later, he moved to the United States, where we all have the right to vote, for now. Now, all it takes is a Sharpie to make you a citizen, or not. No metaphysical anguish at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._I._Hayakawa
Politics makes strange bedfellows, doesn't it? And history, making fun of us, tends toward repetition.
Human nature is not actually that hard to figure out. Just watch people in action, you'll get it!
So: my position is that the territory IS the map, until I am convinced otherwise.
And maybe there is a Corruption 2.0 that is better than the old one, but I will believe it when I see it, if then. Even so, I'll bet that just a little would go a long way, kind of like a virus in a vaccine. Or a Kennedy.
Or cynicism.
By the way, ignore that little "Whoopsie" we just had about the so-called war plans...and try not to think of that movie "Dr. Strangelove," it was just a satire, so what. Personally, I think we should hire these guys instead:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS3O0OOn0a0
Make America Funny Again.
It sounds like you want something with the legitimacy of courts, but far more speed, expertise, and certainty. I know enough about the history of US administrative law to know that this describes agencies back before the 1960's, when suing agencies displaced baseball as the national sport. In this respect, in the US, the Great Society killed the New Deal, especially when the better-funded political right created its own litigation shops.
It's easy enough for a legislature to make agency actions unreviewable. That might help speed and certainty. But it won't do wonders for legitimacy. And as far as expertise goes, civil servants are badly underpaid everywhere but Singapore, AFAIK. Back in the day, a fresh associate at Cravath would make half again a fresh government lawyer. Now, it's more like six- or eight-fold.
I think it is more a change in the relationship between existing institutions that I'm looking for than any new institution. In particular, a more porous, two-way relationship between the public and private sector, probably facilliated by more use of secondments in both directions. In the white paper we call this "corporatism" on the European model. Obviously it has its own failure mode, but I think that "regulatory capture" might also be an outdated concept.
Are there any good examples of societies that work, compared to the US? Or where at least SOME things are working that we could learn from? Am thinking of Scandinavia, where they seem to have actually on how to have a government that works for the populace. Finland re-thinking the school system comes to mind, as an example. We haven't fundamentally re-thought "government" in the US in a long time. But we did re-think "business." Now it is "all about the shareholders!" "Making money with money." My friends and family in Canada and Sweden think the US is crazy right now, and I agree. We take everything to extremes. Sweeten the pot with social media, and you have quite a brew. Right now, trust and affordability seem at an all-time low here. The road to hell was paved by being unable to see the consequences of our actions, plus self interest. If only Thatcher was right and we didn't have a society at all, then we could just get rid of the bad apples. Trump fixed the ice rink in Central Park, but breaks everything else he touches. We don't have a government, we have a personality cult. And Musk has no theory of government, he just hates it, except when he gets money from it. Maybe our first principle has always to be living in reality. But people don't know it when they aren't.
China works fairly well and their big thing used to be local autonomy - they would give mayors pretty much carte blanche and a blank check to do whatever they wanted.
That's close to how central banks roll these days. Especially during financial crises, when a lot of good bankers need work that looks good on their resume, and the central banks need good bankers.
FWIW my own experience of working for Lend Lease in 2011 was that demand & predictability were the most important issues for property investment firms. I watched a lot of grown men close to tears as their plans were shredded by the man now given responsibility for managing the Crown Estate, but I never heard anything about NIMBYs. That was just a cost of doing business. These companies have a pipeline of consented sites that will keep them going for decades. That’s not the problem - the problem is can they let/sell these assets & can they rely on gov policy to stay the same over the lifecycle of the build / rent / sale?
Personally, I think there’s some kind of mash-up of Sam Bowman, D Cummings ideas that can get this stuff to happen. We need multi year development strategies that don’t get messed around by incoming govs. We need infrastructure spend to sit outside the Treasury so it doesn’t have to fight the OBR’s spreadsheet fiddlers. And we need to start small & modular to build public (& bond market) trust. Big stuff should wait until we have rebuilt organisational knowhow & skills to deliver. I think if we can offer guaranteed yields, no political to & fro & a rapid action public sector task force to drive it, we might be able to kickstart industrial growth. My own suggestion (which is regularly kicked to the ground) is to use a SWF. Capitalise it with some public asset then drive pension money into it for a guaranteed return. The SWF sits outside Treasury / reach of bond markets & can have cross-political, multi year buy-in. It has its own task force - driven, highly skilled public servants - who kick down doors & make stuff happen. And where is the public consent? Well it could produce a citizen dividend when in surplus. You could also provide a better, honest version of Musk’s doge dashboard - ie clear reporting on goals > spend > outcomes so that people see tangible delivery not just opaque 3rd hand reporting that doesn’t appear to improve their lives.
I just read your essay at Niskanen. Sounds like the problem is essentially risk aversion, which is all over the culture. Institutions must please the public, individuals, and anyone who could have any interest in the outcome no matter how small. "Safety" culture.
No wonder they become risk averse.
Our expectations have metastasized, like our cars.
Actually we no longer want (or are offered) mere cars, we get so-called "Sport Utility Vehicles," which are neither sporty nor utilitarian. Luxury on the inside, a shell keeping the outside world away on the outside.
Sorta like the Space Shuttle: more expensive and more dangerous than what it replaced, thereby negating its very purpose. But it did meet the needs of NASA, an agency that found itself without a mission, and its contractors.
We must be in a perverse feedback loop, where the very things we do to improve things make them worse.
Funny how utilitarianism, like effective altruism, are mental models that don't even work very well. Never mind that idea that markets "just work!"
You didn't mention the extreme individualism in the Anglosphere, or at least in the USA, so I will. How can collective problems be solved one person at a time? That whole forest and tree thing.
It isn't just construction, we can't do anything, anywhere. Boeing forgot how to build jets (or rockets), regulations and parents (and now DOGE) have the schools playing defense...you name an Institution.
Plus, Covid.
I drove through a big intersection near me yesterday. and it suddenly became gridlocked. How's that for a mental model of where we are? Two many actors, each seeking their own ends, driving into one limited space, and filling it, so then no one can move.
Too many expectations colliding with each other. American want it all. We've got powerful attractors like LUXURY and STATUS and ME that put us in a trance. They are the magnets, we are the iron filings. We got what we wanted...but not completely, since our wants are contradictory, and infinite. No "thing" ever satisfies us.
Any successful society or government is going to have to persuade people that they will be better off if they throttle back on their personal desires and think of the big picture. But "You can't always get what you want" is more Thatcher than Trump. We desire everything, all the time, now. The rest flows downstream from that. I realize that clever designers, like political leaders, can help keep the traffic flowing, sometimes.
Do mental models ever get so big they collapse under their own weight?
Or do we personally get unbalanced, and spend too much time looking at the models? Are we like meteorologists that stare at the computer screens, and miss the storms clouds right outside the window?
Marie Antoinette had this problem, too.
"I do think there’s far too much emphasis on housebuilding and homeownership, and that (not coincidentally) there are a lot of very wrong theories of real estate economics"
I am not clear what exactly you disagree with.
Is it "housebuilding" because we could build more dense residences flats, or we don't even need to build more shelter?
Is it "homeownership" because public housing, rentals, etc, may offer better solutions to providing shelter? Zurich, Switzerland is almost all rentals. Was Thatcherism and "owning your own home" a major part of the problem?
Historically, the UK cleared slums but built Corbusier-inspired blocks of flats that proved awful. Where land is expensive, ugly houses were built almost next to each other, such as around Canary Wharf. Similar monstrosities were built in California's Silicon Valley - "zero lot" houses.
Whatever happened to quality mid-rise flats built well rather than cheaply? I do wonder about British builders after the Grenfell disaster. the many poorly built buildings that have saddled owners with unsaleable properties. I recall a UK documentary (1080s?) showing that Wimpey's homes built with wood frames and clad in a single brick skin had the wood frames lying on wet ground and likely to rot. What was the company thinking - that British weather was like the US West? [The quality of homes in California has followed the build 'em cheap and sell 'em high. Custom home quality in the materials & joinery has degraded significantly over the last century.]
"You can’t do Thatcherism without an oil boom, you can’t do Blairism without a financial bubble"
b/w
"Are you any closer to being able to incorporate a theory of power? Nope"
Are you sure you aren't? Theories of power can be, generally should be, very simple. In these two examples, competitive pressures pushed the development of new technologies while policymakers tried (and failed) to hold together the political coalitions that were formed under the status quo ante production system. Growth booms provide new opportunities for coalition-building by eliminating the status quo (or reducing the power of its bias).
So your theory of power is structural and comes from Lindblom (Politics and Markets) in combination with Chwieroth/Walter (democratic publics have increasing expectations of their governments' ability to produce excellent economic outcomes, probably because the majority are asset-owners now). This provides fertile ground for anti-system/pro-corporate candidates and parties (Lipset and Hooghe and Marks), and the search for political tactics that can bust up status quo structures through the weaponization of those structures for things other than their intended usage (MMT, hard monetarism, various forms of revolution, trillion-dollar coins, a return to McKinleyian tariffs and imperialism, people are throwing all kinds of shit out there these days).
The cybernetics challenge then becomes channeling the Chwieroth/Walter expectations through the Lindblomian structures.
I.e., what did Biden do wrong? Thought he had a deflationary environment to go full FDR [meet expectations] when he didn't [crashed into Lindblom's market structure]. What did Lina Khan do wrong? Used anti-trust to go after future-looking companies, on the basis that they previously controlled already-obsolete technologies. That ship had sailed, they took the wrong lesson from the Microsoft case (Netscape ain't thriving today, altho Mozilla still has a niche).
I took a look at your niskanen summary article, and it's hard to read that and not think of that whole "elite overproduction" thesis. While I was always a bit skeptical of it as a model of power struggle, it does seem to coincide somewhat with your model of too many professionals who are incentivized to justify their existence more so than actually make things happen. But I guess you're pointing out that this is uniquely Anglophone - it's not like they don't have lots of lawyers and consultants in like Korea or Germany or whatever. Hmm...
This sound a lot like Ant Breach’s advocacy of Japanese-style zoning and German-style S and B plans. Also known as: “an *actual* planning system.”
"derisking infrastructure projects so that the planning risk is below the threshold of acceptability"
After they commit sibstantial resources to actual building, private sector developers want planning risk at zero, but before that they like it to be quite high (or appear/be so to everyone else, if we're not being all EMH about that possibility).
Planning risk/uncertainty is after all what keeps the price of unpermitted land low and allows advantages in risk-assessment, legal resource, 'influence', diversification, time preference etc to yield massive capital gains in banked land.
1) Did you used to post at Crooked Timber?
2) It seems to me that the current interest in abundance is about updating our basic institutions from their 19th century roots to the 20th century. And you may be right about cybernetics as the way to do. At the very least, yes, cybernetics, requisite variety and all that.
But I'm not sure it's adequate to the challenge of AI. Perhaps the economic side of it, perhaps. But AI is, after all, fundamentally a mind technology. I don't think Homo economicus is up to that. We need to think more seriously about Homo ludens, something I've started exploring: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/03/homo-economicus-sucks-homo-ludens-rocks.html
3) The philosopher Paul Feyerabend wrote of abundance late in his career. His was a more metaphysical concept, about the nature of reality. There's always more more more, the real is endless, while we're always trying to reduce and contain it. I've got a post about that: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/10/fecundity-and-implementation-in-complex.html
Booz Allen Hamilton stock price tells a part of the story in a chart.