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Notes -
Small Costs, Widely Distributed
Often when someone is making a policy argument, they will ignore the costs or downsides to their preferred policy. This is of course quite normal as part of persuasion and rhetoric, but I want to draw attention to a few examples of this where the arguer at least ought to make an attempt at neutrality.
Alcohol consumption: Public health officials look just at health outcomes, which are sometimes negative. But alcohol has clear benefits to the drinker (as /u/Difficult_Ad_3879 mentions). Even beyond the personal happiness derived from drinking, it is socially useful as a costly signal proving trustworthiness1. If a social group or an organization can use alcohol as a tool for establishing the trustworthiness of its members, it can reduce internal transaction costs since members don't have to monitor each other as much. This increases economic efficiency. How much I'm having a hard time finding evidence on; maybe because it's unpopular to be seen as an apologist for alchohol consumption.
Induced demand: Among urbanists and YIMBYs, the concept of induced demand is often used to argue against increased road capacity. If people just drive more when new roads are added, what's the point? As /u/freet0 notes, of course there is value in driving beyond just driving fast. You actually get places! The fact that people drive more when there are more roads indicates that there were places that weren't worth driving to before, but now they are. Those roads opened up access to useful places to go2.
Trans women are women: If some people experience pain because they're not considered to be in the social category they want to be in, what is the harm in everyone else agreeing that they are actually in that category? Why not consider trans women to be real women? This argument doesn't take into account the fact that words and categories are useful. In particular, they're useful to all the other people who are using those words and categories. For people who only want to date partners with whom they can reproduce, and for anyone who wants to predict others' behavior by knowing their biology, diluting the meaning of social categories and blurring their boundaries makes those categories less useful.
How suburban sprawl hurts the poor: This Vox article summarizes the sentiment that suburban sprawl is bad because it makes it harder for poor people to get around. And yet people continue to support suburban zoning restrictions in their voting choices. There is a cost that proponents of development and public transit (basically, of making it easy for poor people to get around) are missing though: poor people are bad (on average) to be around3. I'm not talking strictly about dry metrics like crime rate either; at a more basic level, the qualities that cause a person to be poor basically mean they don't produce as much value from their life as richer people do. As a consequence it's not as valuable to have such peope in one's community as it is to have more competent and value-producing people who tend to be richer. The zoning restrictions and bad public transit are just people expressing their preferences to be around people who are more worth being around.
Traffic safety and value of time: The discourse around traffic safety almost always ignores people's time and life value in the calculus. Where I live, the city has been building "road diets", where general traffic lanes are removed in favor of bike lanes and center turn lanes. This reduces collisions, especially with pedestrians, at the expense of making every single trip longer for everybody in a car. I did the math, and the reduction in trip times for my family's typical commute (2 minutes) is almost exactly the same as the expected loss in life-minutes from all the risk due to riding in a vehicle (1.46 deaths/100m miles, times ~5 miles, is 1.92 minutes). That estimate of vehicle risk is probably way off, though, since these are city streets at speeds where vehicle passengers are in no danger. So for my family we're losing expected life-years due to the road diet. Potentially even worse is the effect of car seats. Anyone who has had small kids in their life knows how much difficulty car seats add to the logistics of your life. They're gigantic (good luck having three kids if you have a sedan) and any time someone else could help carry a child somewhere in their car they have to have a car seat available on every leg. This actually figures into potential parents' choices and causes some people, on the margin, to not have a child. Someone did the math4, and the loss in children born due to the car seat requirement is about 140x times greater than the children's lives saved due to the extra safety.
One theme here is that the unmentioned costs of policy positions tend to be diffused across large numbers of people, while the benefits tend to be concentrated.
Another theme, maybe more important, is that opponents tend to not want to bring up the costs because they're socially undesirable things to talk about, even if they have significant real-world effects. A really strong theme here is that the unmentioned costs apply to higher-status people, while the benefits to the proposed changes apply to lower-status people. This applies to alcohol, trans recognition, and suburban sprawl (and maybe not induced traffic demand).
Notes:
1Between cheap and costly signals: the evolution of partially honest communication
2Induced Demand Threads
Against Induced Demand
stucchio on housing
There were several more threads on the topic of cars, urbanism, YIMBYs, and induced demand which I can't find anymore. I think Zorba posted at some point about getting access to more land area through highways.
Trans People Don't Exist (essay by ymeskhout)
3Why are people poor? (Cato)
4Car Seats as Contraception. Quote from the abstract: "We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980".
For what it's worth, I remember learning about this when taking AP government -- that the ability of interest groups to coordinate people result in policies that benefit the few will diffusing the costs on the many.
Farmers care a lot more about getting farmer subsidies than you or I care about paying for our share of them, because the difference in income for the farmers is orders of magnitude larger than the difference in income to your or me. Of course having lots of nakedly rent-seeking interest groups is awful, and one of the values of economics as a field is in providing reasonable criteria for when a policy deserves to be implemented (solving negative externalities, reducing deadweight loss, etc.).
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It's interesting that this isn't at all true when you phrase it in, let's say 'populist' terms. But when you try to make the same argument in more academic terms you invite unpopularity.
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Economists think about this all the time--see, for example, this video from David Friedman, but it's also one of the first things that are discussed in introductory Econ right after the perfect competition model. But I don't think this post does a great job of identifying such cases; the video I linked has what I consider to be better examples.
For the most part, it's up to each person to determine if the benefits outweigh the costs. Most people can determine how much they like drinking; an estimate of other people's preferences won't help you much. But... what does this have to do with diffusion? Generally, each person experiences the costs and benefits of their own drinking. If anything, the cost of drinking is more diffuse, since health care costs are often socialized even in the US, so non-drinkers will pay for drinkers' drinking-related health care.
Again, I'm confused as to what this has to do with your general thesis. Generally, both the benefits and the costs of more road space are relatively diffuse, at least in North America, since most people drive most of the time (edit: this depends on the road/project; for one road serving one area, what I said is wrong. For expanding many roads serving many areas, it's more correct, although there still will probably be some agents with more or less benefit and cost). If anything, since many more people drive than bike, the costs are concentrated and the benefits are spread around (sanity check: if the benefits were concentrated, it would be easy to privately fund roads; this almost never happens).
(On a side note, IMO, this is a strawman of why urbanists care about ID. "Reducing traffic" is an explicitly stated goal of a lot of road construction and urban and suburban design, so the fact that congestion isn't actually reduced is an important counterargument. Moreover, the fact that people want to go places but currently can't is not an argument in favor of building more roads: It is impossible to build enough roads to not have consistent congestion in any reasonably populated area. You can certainly reframe ID as "lots of people want to go places but the current infrastructure doesn't allow it" but all this tells you is that roads are an inefficient use of space in populated areas).
I can't tell what this has to do with costs or benefits being diffuse at all. It sounds like you're just dropping an argument for zoning into the post at random. A zoning law has a very clear, concentrated cost (someone who would like to build a different type of housing unit on their land) with diffuse benefits (spread across all of their neighbors). (edit for clarity: Zoning, like many policies, can have both concentrated and diffuse costs and benefits. I was trying to get at the point that there's nothing particularly concentrated or diffuse about the particular argument you mentioned).
First, I think your math is wildly off. 1.46 looks to be roughly the number of deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, while 5 miles is, presumably, the distance of one commute. So 1.92 minutes is the risk due to your car making 1 commute, which means that these values are actually extremely similar.
But also, where are these numbers coming from? If people are biking or walking instead of driving, then congestion will go down and you won't take more time (certainly the converse, where adding road capacity does not reduce congestion, has been consistently observed--see the ID argument just above; you don't seem to dispute that ID occurs, simply how to interpret it).
I really want to emphasize this point, though. By driving, you expose other people to danger while slightly reducing your own exposure to danger and increasing your convenience. This is a highly negative externality and deserves to be heavily "taxed" to discourage it, or you should be forced to negotiate. If the math does work out as you claim, it should cost an absolutely trivial amount for you alone to pay off all of the cyclists and pedestrians in the city to keep the roads.
Also, from a more dry utilitarian point of view, expected amount of time is not the only relevant variable. A small risk of dying increases the variance a lot, and is something that people definitely care about. In this case, downweighting the diffuse costs is entirely appropriate.
Thanks for this - this is the correct version of the ID argument against road building that I was struggling to put in ordinary language. In econospeak, the proponents of the new road promised a first-order benefit (shorter journey times for the high-value journeys which are already being made due to reduced traffic) and delivered a second-order benefit (marginal journeys which would not have been made now are, or journeys which would have been timed to avoid rush hour are now made during rush hour for a marginal improvement in convenience). Traffic congestion is pure social waste (in fact it is worse than pure social waste due to emissions of idling or slow-moving vehicles), but if you use efficiently-collected tolls to reduce congestion by keeping marginal drivers off the roads then you can deliver a social benefit from road building - most of which comes in the the form of increased toll revenue.
Interestingly, in cities with successful, widely-used public transport (which includes all European and 1st-world Asian capitals), you see induced demand effects on public transport as well. For whatever reason, the anti-transit-funding libertarian crowd don't normally raise the induced demand objection, and when they do the "unsuppressing suppressed demand is good" response normally is raised, loudly. Whether the transit case is really different depends on what you think about the social costs of overcrowding on roads vs. transit - it feels different because overcrowded tube trains get you where you are going roughly on time, but overcrowded roads cause severe delays.
Yep, congestion pricing plus non-driving alternatives is the correct solution to traffic, not building endless roads.
There's a great youtube video on ID applied to transit: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8wlld3Z9wRc&ab_channel=OhTheUrbanity%21
They make similar points. In particular, it's much easier to both increase capacity (increase frequency of trains, signal priority, etc. which also improves the experience of riding rather than worsening it) and apply congestion pricing (since they already have ticketing systems). It also has a lot fewer externalities, and in the case of walking and cycling, has positive knock-on effects (people getting more exercise).
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I don't have time to watch the whole Friedman lecture but his first few examples are about market failures, which is a slightly different topic to what I was getting at. What I was trying to express (and didn't do a great job of) was that in discussions of policies, there are often costs that are not mentioned so we never get a full cost/benefit comparison. The specific examples are just examples of the "missing" costs and I wasn't trying to do a full accounting of all the costs/benefits in each example.
I used expected life-years lost for driving 5 miles, which is approximately 1.46/100m * (5 miles) * (50 years of life left), which multiplies to about 2 minutes. Urban driving reduces that by about half, so it really should be about 1 minute. The specific numbers are not important though; the public conversation was only ever about Vision Zero rather than trip times.
Also true! But the numbers matter. I don't think there are a lot of people in my neighborhood whose behavior will be changed by these particular road diets - as I mentioned downthread, there is already a dedicated bike path a block away, and also the neighborhood is hilly, which is a non-starter for most people to bike. I will state that in a full cost-benefit accounting, the road diet might make sense. No one did that analysis though; it was all one-sided statistics and aesthetic judgments.
One of the causes of market failures is diffuse costs or diffuse benefits. Some examples in the video include tariffs and drug regulation.
There are theoretically infinitely many costs and benefits to any policy (or if not, far more than could be feasibly thought of and estimated, especially once you start taking into account 2nd order effects, or 3rd order effects, etc). I don't think the process of choosing what to ignore is really related to whether the costs and benefits are diffuse or not, except to the extent that diffuse costs and benefits may be harder to see. For the most part, I think whether someone thinks of a diffuse cost or benefit is, like most other arguments, related to their bias or personal experience rather than anything else. Like with the travel time example, both of the things you mention are somewhat diffuse (exactly how diffuse depending on how many people cycle or walk vs driving, which depends on the policy itself, which makes it even more complicated). Someone advocating for reducing traffic volume is probably going to focus on cyclist and pedestrian deaths because (depending on how charitable we're being) deaths are more important than commute time and/or they have ideological preferences for bikes over cars.
If you want to say an argument is being unfairly ignored, I think you do have to show that it is at least plausibly of the correct scale to be relevant.
Ok, but then I think your interpretation is off: Both numbers apply to 1 single trip. Every other person who does the same drive will face the same delay and also increase risk by the same amount (glossing over any issues with induced demand, assuming marginal = average, etc).
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The key fact about most of your examples (except maybe trans, and I'm not so sure about that) is not that they're diffused among lots of people, but that they have to do with doing things that people want to do. "Someone wants to do it" is one of the first ideas that any social movement tries to nip in the bud, because the whole point of having something as a movement is that you want to force people to go along with it who don't want to. Putting a value on people's desires is contrary to that.
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How? How is it a costly signal and how does it establish trustworthiness?
Exactly what @marinuso said about telling the truth. I will add that in general most people can't drink heavily and still convincingly fake things - even if you have a high tolerance you still get drunk and it's hard to lie about how you're feeling in my experience.
On top of this, people tend to be more open to experience and foolish-acting when drunk. In a healthy, strong social group, sharing embarrassing experiences can help bonding quite a bit. You also share secrets with each other that you wouldn't normally mention.
On top of all this, getting a drink is a good excuse/motivator to get people together in one social space for an activity, with little investment on the event organizer's part.
These are just reasons why drinking is good, not why it is a costly signal of trustworthiness.
Is a social drinker more trustworthy than a completely sober guy? Maybe, but you can make plausible-sounding arguments either way. Maybe the drinker is less likely to have elaborately hidden secrets, but the teetotaler has also demonstrated capacity for self denial and high impulse control, which has to be worth something.
Do teetotalers have higher or lower than average rates of criminality? I would bet lower, but I could be wrong.
I’m not sure, but I suspect “teetotaler” actually includes a weird combination of a few different groups of people for whom the answers will differ:
people who don’t drink for moral reasons
people who don’t drink due to being recovering alcoholics
people who don’t drink due to illness
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I would absolutely argue that a social drinker who is drunker than normal is far more trustworthy than a sober guy, at least if you specifically ask the drinker what he believes.
Please make an argument as to how the sober person could answer more honestly?
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That seems dubious to me. What portion of most people's drinking involves getting that drunk? We have a lot of mechanisms for signaling and trust; large amounts of alcohol consumption as a way to demonstrate trust seems likely to be limited to frats, gangs, and similar groups.
Depends on the group. Also it doesn't have to be a group activity - two or three people can meet at a group and agree to go get a drink after. That's typically how it happens, and how you form stronger bonds. You break out from a larger group into a smaller subset.
Also, do you really think frats and gangs are the only groups that drink together? I fear you might have a bias against alcohol. Off the top of my head - theater goers, dancers, people who play pool, many people who go to sports game, etc get drunk enough to become more honest than most.
Only ones to drink together? Of course not. Only ones to drink together enough to get drunk, often enough for it to be a significant contributor to trust? Could be. I've been in a lot of contexts where people get drunk (including sports and theater) and can't say trust ever seemed to come from drinking. It came from working together. If anything, excessive drunkenness was associated with less trust ("do they have enough self-control to help the group succeed?", "they did something inappropriate while drunk").
I'm not biased against alcohol. I drink and have gotten drunk. Making such an accusation is a waste of space, and I may as well just accuse you of being biased towards alcohol. Does doing so further the discussion in any way?
I think this is the fundamental misunderstanding - I see 3-4 drinks to be enough for most people to be more trustworthy. You don't need to get sloshed in order to be more open to telling the truth, in fact if someone is wasted they're probably going to be speaking nonsense. I called you out being biased because I thought you meant nobody besides frats, gangs etc had more than a couple drinks which I saw as blatantly false.
I am still curious as to your thought about sober people being more honest than someone 3-4 drinks in. I hope I've clarified well enough.
Yes, I assumed more than 3-4. That isn't a lot for people who consistently have several drinks at once.
Personally, at 3-4 drinks I certainly will say things I wouldn't be willing to say when sober. Does this reflect increased honesty? Is inhibition due to consideration of social rules dishonest? This seems like a philosophical question; I like to think that who I am sober, including the System 2 considerations, is a more useful picture of "who I am" than drunk-me saying the first thing that comes to mind, like how my choice of hobbies is more reflective of who I am than my reaction to jump scares.
If specifically you mean "are people more willing to say thing they think are true but unpopular" that might be true at 3-4 drinks, but I've been in a lot of situations where people drink that much and it doesn't seem like they say things they wouldn't say normally. Like, I'm more likely to ask someone out, maybe do Karaoke. In my experience I'm not any more likely to say controversial things. It might theoretically have this effect, but as I've said all of the groups I've been in seemed to build trust primarily in other ways.
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Drunks and children tell the truth.
OTOH, if you're practiced and can hold your drink better than the other party, now you have the advantage over them.
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I agree with your overall thesis, and I think it applies widely to many things including most economic policies. Also things like Covid lockdowns and school closures, which I'm surprised you didn't mention - even if only small costs were associated with these things, those costs would still be a big deal when distributed across the population.
But I think this is a weak example of your thesis:
"Woman" was always a noisy signal for fertility and behavior. Only a tiny percentage of people (<0.5%) are transwomen, and only a fraction of them pass well enough that you would be confused about their birth sex. Injecting a tiny amount of noise into the predictive power of the term "woman" (which already had relatively weak predictive power) is I think too insignificant a cost to worry about, even when spread across the population.
That said, there are plenty of other costs associated with "transwomen are women." Things like transwomen in women's sports, the possibility of regret or detransitioning, and the fact that people are being censored for disagreeing with the orthodoxy.
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Beyond what is already said, I would consider loss of autonomy on determining the categories pretty serious harm. If I am free to define, say, what is beautiful or tasty, these categories have meaning for me. If I have to accept something is beautiful or some food is tasty - or, that some potential sexual partner is attractive - because otherwise I would be punished, these categories lose any meaning to me. I may even comply in some cases, if the consequences of compliance are better than the costs of the resistance, but these categories will never have value for myself anymore - they'd be just something I am forced to do. For me, the implied loss of cultural integrity and necessary forced expression and behavior would qualify as harm.
I agree this is a problem, but it's a different one than the OP pointed out. People should be free to speak as they wish.
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In 4 of your 5 examples (not TWAW, where the benefit is concentrated on trans women), both the benefits and the costs of the policy are small and distributed. The result is that in debates on most of these issues, normies end up ignoring diffuse costs and benefits and arguing purely from aesthetics.
Going through point by point:
The pro-alcohol argument is about the small benefits to a large number of responsible drinkers. The anti-alcohol argument is about the ex ante small costs to a large number of potential victims of irresponsible drinkers (obviously ex post the cost to the people who are killed by drunk drivers are not small, but the traditional public choice argument for why diffuse costs are ignored works ex ante). Absent media amplification of rare negative events, the that-which-is-seen bias works in favour of the drinkers. Media amplification of drink-driving deaths creates a that-which-is-seen bias in favour of the prigs. For an example of how effective this amplification is, consider figure 5 in this report (the report is by a prig lobby group, but I am co. paring costs to costs so the bias shouldn't matter). According to the anti-alcohol lobby, <5% of the negative externalities of alcohol use in the UK are due to drink-driving. (Most of them are due to drunken crime, including domestic violence). But drink-driving takes up a lot more than 5% of the public debate.
Road building is a typical example of a policy with somewhat concentrated benefits (to the people who use the new road, and to the politicians who cut the ribbon) and diffuse costs (to taxpayers) - the induced demand argument (which I agree is stupid in the way it is normally made, but there is a steelman which is worth taking seriously) is an argument that the concentrated benefits will be smaller than predicted.
The benefit of keeping poors out of middle-class neighborhoods through snob zoning is diffuse, but the metro-area-level costs of not building enough housing when every neighborhood is snob zoned are even more diffuse - this is why the NIMBYs have been winning for 50+ years and only started losing when metro-level housing shortages got bad enough to affect the PMC.
The point of a road diet is to benefit non-drivers at the expense of drivers. If the road diet is sane (and I am aware that sometimes insane road diets happen because people support them for aesthetic reasons rather than because any identifiable human being benefits), then both of these groups are actually quite concentrated. A good road diet increases the throughput of human beings going where they want to go because an inefficient use of street space is replaced by a more efficient one.
This is of course a functionally equivalent statement to "good policies have benefits that outweigh the harms". Yes, that's the definition. But that presumes the people who are making the policies are competent and well-meaning, and they never seem to be even one. I would expect a 'road diet' (especially when explicitly named so) to be done by politicians who are at best following a fad, at worst intending to hurt people they think are their enemies.
In the city where I live they banned bicycles out of the (old medieval) city center. Technically cars too, but already nobody drove there (who in their right mind would even try). But the American Democrats are hampering transport so we should also hamper transport, it's cargo cult blue-tribe-ism. To top it all of, official taxis can still go in. So the local hoity-toities can still be ferried to and from their subsidized cultural events in style. To their credit (?) I haven't seen much actual enforcement.
Can you provide some context on the bicycle ban? What is their stated reasoning? For example, I could understand such a ban based on a lack of space, because a mediaeval city centre probably has narrow streets, but this can't be the case given the taxis.
They 'pedestrianized' the area. It's been a few years, I don't recall any reason being given apart from the usual platitudes about safety and livability. The place does get thronged on the weekends - or did, prior to the Covid lockdowns bankrupting half the shops.
Official taxis being exempt is a citywide thing, they also get to go on bus lanes, and it's been that way since forever.
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Excellent point in general, and I think strikes clearly at how the "just the numbers" approach to public policy will tend to only select for the preferred costs and benefits of what the person making the policy wants to select for.
I've got to nitpick though - I think you did the thing you're complaining about! (Although I may be misunderstanding, correct me if I am.)
Sure, some people are losing time to the change in the roads, but aren't pedestrians and cyclists gaining improvements in both transit times and quality of life? How many people are more likely to take pedestrian or cycling options when those options are improved? Based on both data and anecdote, I would note that good cycling infrastructure induces demand for cycling and that cycling is way more enjoyable than driving when we're talking about short distances at low speeds. I understand the automotive commuter wanting to save those two minutes, but how many marginal cyclists are deterred by this one?
Of course, if I put numbers on that, I'm just doing the same faux-empirical approach in the opposite direction, only counting up the benefits of the thing that I like. Before long, this becomes pretty recursive and we have to admit that this isn't about the numbers, but about a preference for living in a certain sort of place. Yes, I just want things to be better for cyclists even if it's worse for motorists, and no, I'm not going to be sold on the opposite by any degree of numbers-crunching that demonstrates how my bike lane is costing drivers upwards of two minutes per day.
Yes, you're right - I was trying to highlight the costs that are usually missed; the pedestrian and cyclist lives saved is the front-and-center reason for road diets in the first place so I didn't want to waste space mentioning them.
I actually ride a bike to work and my commute is the best part of my day. It's my kids that have to sit in the car those extra two minutes, and their commute is too far to make by bike so they can't take advantage of the extra cycling infrastructure.
The two road diets along my kids' commute are both examples where the city didn't seem to do a cost/benefit analysis and ended up with poor choices for where to do the road diet. In both cases there is already a dedicated bike path nearby that the vast majority of cyclists use to pass through that neighborhood. The new bike lanes only help cyclists that are heading somewhere local. There's good enough access from the dedicated trails that you only need to go one or two blocks on streets, so this doesn't even help much.
There are ways to put numbers on preferences like this. Metrics like walkability scores are a good start. I think what would fall out of a comprehensive adding up of numbers is that clusters of walkability/bikeability with nice local environments (sidewalk trees, street cafes, parks, etc.) and high-ish density are good, and easy travel between such clusters is good (including travel in personal cars because of their convenience). The road diets I mentioned were built in an area that isn't clearly in either category - there is a lot of vehicular through traffic but there are also businesses along the streets, kind of like a low-speed stroad. A better solution (from me as an arm-chair city planner) would have been to push the business district to the adjacent blocks and add any helpful cycling infrastructure there, and leave the through street with more traffic lanes. The through street cannot be moved because of geography. This solution would make for even nicer cycling (no loud traffic passing) and it would reduce trip times for people who have to drive. Cyclists traveling outside the neighborhood already use the aforementioned separate bike path so that's not a concern.
(This is the point at which someone could object that "push the business district to adjacent blocks" has costs for people living nearby which have to be weighed against these other things. Yes, and those should be accounted for too).
I think at least part of the reason for the city to build road diets like this is more of a moral stance against cars. The city is basically taxing driving, making it more unpleasant and time-wasting because the city does not want people driving personal cars. The opponents of bike lanes and road diets refer to this as a "war on cars" and I think there's truth to it. But it's okay to wage a war on car use if it's actually bad! To tell whether it's bad, though, you have to consider all the tradeoffs.
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I think this is a really insightful point you've made. And really, for a lot of these, it's not just about how and where the costs are distributed, but it's hard to convince some people that the costs are even real. It can be very very nebulous. For TWAW, how can you put an exact cost on the value of precise language and blurring barriers? I personally think the value is real and very high, but it's near impossible to prove. Especially because the people I'd need to convince are completely caught up in a framework that benefits immensely from language being not precise. I've had so many arguments with people over the years where I try to say how it is that wokeness for concepts like TWAW has negatively impacted my life and society, and it's so hard to even get the conversation rolling. It usually just ends up sounding like vague gesturing at conspiracies and minor inconveniences.
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