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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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In general I am skeptical of any comparisons to foreign countries like Japan or any in western Europe. This is because, for example, Japan has a culture of falling in line, keeping your head down, and being normal that is far more strict than culture in America. So the worst of the worst people in Japan are only doing things like, I don't really know, let's just say maybe talking too loud on the phone once in a while. This is far more tolerable than the worst of the worst in America, which OP describes as:

One of my best friends used to live in a condo that was seated next door to one of these, which gave them a rather first-hand and literal application of what it means to say, “yes in my backyard” to this sort of project, and it was about as unpleasant as you’d expect. The frequency of parking lot fights, ambulances in the middle of the night, and police presence were, again, about you might expect.

Not only that, but for Japan especially, they are more hostile to foreigners than America is, so they have far less of an immigration workload to deal with. That means if you're Japanese and you live in Japan and you were raised Japanese from the start, your neighbors are more likely to be just like you and as Japanese as you are, and dealing with the same culture. Having neighbors similar to you is what OP wants:

I want to live next to married couples with decent careers. [...] Even aside from trustworthiness, transience, investment in the property, and quality of friends and relatives, we simply don’t share the same cultural norms and preferences. I would rather be around the petit bourgeois.

Of course, it's not all roses. Japanese culture has plenty of downsides (high rate of innocent convictions, peer pressure, work suicides, etc.). But I simply don't understand why any time someone brings up how Japan or the Netherlands has better housing/urban design/transit/etc. they will always, without fail, never mention the important difference between those countries and America: culture. (And other important things too, like law enforcement policies.)

Let me clarify my point. I'm generally skeptical of arguments of the form "they did [thing] in [Japan/Europe], why can't we do it here?" that do not take into account culture. Because my answer to that question is culture. If you live in Japan and affordable housing gets built next door, the worst thing your new neighbors might do is talk on the phone too loudly. If you live in America and affordable housing gets built next door, the worst thing that could happen is, well, let me just quote OP again:

One of my best friends used to live in a condo that was seated next door to one of these, which gave them a rather first-hand and literal application of what it means to say, “yes in my backyard” to this sort of project, and it was about as unpleasant as you’d expect. The frequency of parking lot fights, ambulances in the middle of the night, and police presence were, again, about you might expect.

So then people oppose these projects when they otherwise wouldn't if they had lived in Japan.

You state that "Prices are lower because supply is higher." This I do not have a disagreement with. But you seem to miss the point of why, exactly, supply is higher.

I think your mistake is characterizing it as "wasteful" for people to pay to price out undesirable people from their neighborhoods. People pay that premium for a reason: they think it's worth spending a lot of extra money to not have to live around those people.

In other words, the nimbies you're responding to are essentially saying "we'd rather give up a lot of money than live around those people" and your response is essentially "but that's a lot of money that could be used otherwise". Which... well, yes, of course, but people derive value from that money.

Your musical chairs point - that someone has to live near these people - is trivially true. But a basic principle of living in a free market liberal society is that people get to selfishly make themselves better off if they're able to afford it. Perhaps we'd be better off if people donated more of their wealth to alleviate the burdens of the less fortunate, but human nature is what it is. Why single out housing as the one domain where people shouldn't be able to use their wealth to obtain things they want at the expense of others?

Ok but how much money exactly does it take to price out undesirables and who/what else are you pricing out at the point the price actually gets to? If you have multiple children have you decided which one will get the house and which one(s) will be priced out of the neighborhood they grew up in?

This sounds like a good idea. Let's apply it to the rest of society first, and then apply it here last. Reasonable?

Free markets are pretty neat! They solve a whole host of problems quite elegantly. I'm pretty sure they don't solve all problems, though, and it seems to me that for some problems, they only offer a solution if the whole system is free-market end-to-end. It is not obvious to me that each incremental freeing of a market has a linearly-positive effect. I think it is obvious that a market can get "more free" in specific ways that benefit some and not others, such that the system ends up worse-off on average when that "freedom" does not actually generalize across the whole system.

More generally, there's a thing I've observed where people argue that people should apply policy X in one specific area, where it will be to their short-term advantage, while absolutely stonewalling such policies everywhere else, where the people on the other side would derive advantage from them. Call it "policy arbitrage". I prefer specific policies because I think they will have good effects, not because they have a specific label on them. If there's a label I like, but it seems both that the policy it's applied to will have bad effects on net, and also that it won't do much to actually advance other policies that seem better, even ones with the same label, I'm not going to support it.

The market, as a whole is not actually free. It's somewhat plausible to me that an actual free market would be better than what we have, but this change would not actually make the market as a whole free, does not seem likely to even measurably help in making the whole market free, and does seem likely to cause immediate, highly significant harms. If you tell me that I should support such policies because "free markets", I'm going to tell you to come back when you've actually got the market free elsewhere. What I'm not going to do is embrace immediate, obvious harms in the hope that nebulous, uncertain benefits materialize, someday, at some unspecified date in the future.

TL;DR - Free markets != Free(er) markets, so arguments for the one don't generalize to the other.

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