the most ambitious crossover

abundance x niskanen x me

I’ve been trailing this for a while, but my Niskanen Center White Paper is nearly out, and the summary essay for it has now been published along with a load of others, in a collection called “The Law Of Abundance”. That title is meant to be a contrast to “The Law of Constraint”, in its sense meaning the way that administrative law is currently set up to stop the government from doing things.

I personally think this is all about cybernetics, of course, and I can dimly perceive some foreshadowing in “Designing Freedom” (although irritatingly no pithy quotes as yet). The modern regulatory state was set up for a world in which the government had a lot of capacity, compared to the variety it had to regulate. So the problem was to constrain what it could do – matching the capacity of private citizens and civil society by giving them the legal system as a force amplifier.

Them days are gone; the government barely has enough capacity these days to chase after its basic responsibilities, let alone to launch new megaprojects. And so it needs an entirely different set of relationships, one that allows richer communication and negotiation to facilitate compromise and agreement to do necessary things. The 1970s regulatory state isn’t up to that, so it needs to be rethought. That’s partly why I’m happy to be associated with the Niskanen Center – I really think that cybernetics is the 21^st century public choice theory that we need.

Below, a few FAQs for my regular readers, to accompany the essay “The NIMBYs aren’t who you think”. (and the forthcoming white paper, “The problem factory: Pre-emptive risk aversion in infrastructure planning and the role of professional services”).

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1. What’s a nice guy like you doing in a place like this? There are people associated with the Abundance Agenda, and a few contributors to this collection, who aren’t natural bedfellows of mine, yep, mainly people I’ve feuded with online over various aspects of regulation and deregulation. The answer to this question is the same one I used to give when people asked me why I was supporting Jeremy Corbyn. And it is fundamentally, that whatever version of left-liberalism describes my personal politics, it is currently very weak indeed. And consequently, it can’t afford to be making enemies, and it definitely can’t afford to spurn anything that looks like a viable political movement to wait until one that’s more exactly ideologically simpatico comes along.

2. That sounds like weak sauce to be honest. Well OK then I’ll put it a bit stronger than that, I actually sympathize a lot more with this one than quite a few causes I’ve previously allowed myself to become an online Reply Guy for. There is something fundamentally broken about the liberal state in the 21^st century and it does have something to do with the relationship between regulation and economic activity. And all of our other problems are going to be so much more difficult to solve if we have to do so in an environment of diminishing expectations. You can’t do Thatcherism without an oil boom, you can’t do Blairism without a financial bubble and you can’t do anything in the kind of productivity environment the UK is currently stuck in.

3. Isn’t this just a rebrand for YIMBYism? I don’t think so. It’s more of a recognition that knee-jerk YIMBY cheerleading hasn’t got anywhere and that, in the final analysis, there is no substitute for reluctantly giving up on the chortles and asking the difficult questions about what’s actually gone wrong. Personally, 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 knocking around Abundanceland, but it’s maybe my job to redress that. In any case, many of the planning problems that get raised with respect to housing are also applicable to the much more important questions of infrastructure.

4. So what’s your paper actually about? At last. Thank you.

Shortly after submitting the final set of edits and queries, I realised that the joke I should have used in it is that my contribution is the planning and regulation equivalent of “guns don’t kill people: people do”. Rather than the regulations themselves, we need to look at the overall system by which the regulatory state is brought to a place where it prevents things happening which have majority support. Because if you look at that system, you often find that the actual role of NIMBYs is pretty small. There aren’t very many of them, and whenever things end up in an actual court, they tend to lose. Their role in the system is to be a bogeyman to frighten developers into crazy, over-engineered solutions to forestall hypothetical risks.

If you think that way, then you quickly realise that attacking those regulations which appear to be used the most by “blockers” is not going to solve the problem. It’s always possible to find a different ground on which to object to something, and there is an entire industry dedicated to doing so, in which people have objectives and billable hours targets which are going to get met one way or another.

More than that – get rid of the blockers themselves, and you may still find the problem persists, because as I say above, it’s the threat of hypothetical NIMBYs that causes the sclerosis, not actual NIMBYs. In order to achieve the goal of “legal certainty” – derisking infrastructure projects so that the planning risk is below the threshold of acceptability – by deregulation alone, I think you would have to start messing around with some quite fundamental rights, along with gutting environmental protections to the extent that you had a new and worse problem related to developers’ own incentives.

So the only way to deal with the problem is to unask the question of “legal certainty”. It’s the quasi-legal aspect of the planning system itself that causes the risk. Achieving Abundance is going to require looking again at state capacity, particularly the capacity of the state to communicate and make decisions. That’s the argument made at length in the essay, and at greater length and with specific evidence in the specific case of British infrastructure in the white paper that’s forthcoming. Check it out.

5. Are you any closer to being able to incorporate a theory of power into this so-called “public choice cybernetics” like Margaret Levi asked six months ago? Nope, and it’s getting embarrassing.