-I think we underestimate the impact of the cultural assumption that anything the government does will be 10x as expensive, take 10x as long and then not work properly, with nobody ever being held accountable, but lots of people having been paid along the way.
Of all the ambitious, smart people I know, a single one has said he even believes it's a good thing to work for the government. And he doesn't do it because he thinks the experience would be so miserable compared to working in tech.
-Most people don't seem to understand that regulations don't just add up, but compound.
It's not that each individual, well-intentioned regulation is bad (though some are), it's that many regulations intersect and create edge cases.
And when there's regulation/paperwork at every point, it starts to look like an insurmountable barrier. This is true with entrepreneurship in Europe. People aren't against a specific regulation, the perception is that whatever you want to do, you'll have to ask permission from someone, somewhere, fill out 5 pages of paperwork and wait 3 months before you get to talk to a notary and finally change your business' mailing address (real example from Germany)
-It's hard to make a rational case for this because humans are wired to weigh danger more heavily than upside.
We don't have counterfactuals (the cafe that didn't open because of zoning laws, the parks that were never built, etc.)
Even when politicians admit this problem, they then proclaim they want more housing, innovation or whatever, but getting rid of a regulation has some amount of risk.
So then they try to find the "free lunch": a solution that has none of the downside, but all of the upside.
That free lunch doesn't exist and the resulting solution only gets even more complex.
dfxm12 · 6h ago
And he doesn't do it because he thinks the experience would be so miserable compared to working in tech
I've worked for the US federal government, big tech and another big corp. I would say my experience with the government (and the non tech big corp) was more positive than big tech, as my team was more focused on working/growing together rather than trying to individually outshine everyone else. I feel like we were working towards practical goals that has clear benefits for our customers rather than trying to hit seemingly arbitrary kpi's.
Working for the government I also feel like my work/life balance was most respected as well. YMMV though. Admittedly, N=1 here.
ryathal · 33m ago
That's close enough to my experience in state government. The biggest problem was generally a lack of widespread competence. There was plenty of red tape, but there were also lots of people whose job was to deal with that tape.
red-iron-pine · 5h ago
Having worked for both FedGov and Contractors directly, plus several F500s, the Gubmnt was wayyyyy more focused on loss, waste, and long-term planning.
the levels of waste and BS and general suck at some large mining + O&G companies was astounding, on top of being absolutely brutal, miserable places to work.
FinnLobsien · 5h ago
Interesting! I guess government doesn't equal government and highly depends on where you work and what you work on. The same way being a product manager at Google vs. a founding engineer at a startup vs. a research scientist at OpenAI are different, though they all "work in tech".
Plus, I'm in Europe and my friend runs his own startup, so very different environment.
pu_pe · 6h ago
The legitimate criticism I read against "Abundance" is that for the most part regulations and due process emerged to protect public interests from private capture. In the article the author says we should use "pre-approved vendor lists" or "streamlined approvals" and that sounds great in principle, but could also easily be exploited.
One of the reasons American and German cities are made for cars is because of the influence of their car industry. However, this also pushed out investment in competing alternatives like public transport infrastructure.
derbOac · 5h ago
I have to admit this essay struck me as sort of strange. On the one hand, the EV charging station seems like something fairly straightforward, that should be approved and built fairly quickly. On the other hand, it's just an EV charging station, and without knowing anything more about it, I am just as inclined to believe that this is some small pet project of interest to the author, who no one else really cares about, and he's invoking some grand criticism of government writ large as a way of bringing urgency and grandeur his idiosyncratic interest that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
EV sales are in the middle of a nationwide decline, especially for one of the major manufacturers. I doubt it has anything to do with the 8-space parking lot in Seattle in particular. Add to this stories about charging station compatibility, and I'm not surprised there isn't a greater sense of urgency from the city.
I have my pet projects I'd like to see finished as well, but I don't blame my municipality for not prioritizing them. They have a lot on their plate. It has nothing to do with capture or overregulation, but priorities with constrained staff, budget, and time. People change their minds and city priorities change with popular sentiment.
In some ways, this is a good example of why some prudence is warranted, and maybe you should get the other side of the story. The essay neglects to mention that four of the eight charging stations would be owned by Tesla for example — something that if you're not opposed to, you might at least admit is reasonable for the city to reevaluate — and there is apparently contaminated soil at least nearby the site.
I'm generally in favor of reregulation or deregulation, but I generally feel like land use, environmental, and public space or resources are something where there should be a lot of scrutiny and layers of approval. Once it's gone, it's hard to reclaim and expensive to clean up. I also feel like many examples of complaints in this area and mention of things like Abundance are just like this — someone complains their personal project of interest isn't done fast enough, criticizing the government for being cumbersome and overwrought, while neglecting to mention all the reasons why people might not prioritize their pet project, or why their pet project might reasonably be seen as requiring safeguards or approval processes. The reason why the government is slow with your pet project is because not everyone agrees with you, and there is a commons issue involved.
Meanwhile, discussion about deregulation of things that actually involve personal choice, with little or no public commons issues involved, like medical care, go by the wayside and are never mentioned, or are even hyperregulated.
scythe · 5h ago
>In some ways, this is a good example of why some prudence is warranted, and maybe you should get the other side of the story. The essay neglects to mention that four of the eight charging stations would be owned by Tesla for example — something that if you're not opposed to, you might at least admit is reasonable for the city to reevaluate — and there is apparently contaminated soil at least nearby the site.
No, I think the "other side of the story" here is laughably weak. Four measly charging stations in the whole city of Seattle owned by Tesla? That barely warrants a comment on Hacker News, much less a town hall.
And "contaminated land"? How contaminated are we talking about here? It's crippling to any hope of widespread brownfield redevelopment that something so minimally invasive could be shut down by nebulous, ill-defined contamination. Perhaps we need a standard grading system for land contamination instead of just lumping gasoline and arsenic in the same category.
>I am just as inclined to believe that this is some small pet project of interest to the author, who no one else really cares about, and he's invoking some grand criticism of government writ large as a way of bringing urgency and grandeur his idiosyncratic interest that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
I am inclined to think that this argument could be used to shut down any case study used to critique the bureaucracy. The idea that eight city-owned parking spaces are somehow personally important to anyone is weird enough to demand at least a little evidence.
derbOac · 2h ago
> That barely warrants a comment on Hacker News, much less a town hall.
I think that's maybe what I'm saying? Or the other side of the coin? I personally don't think there's some compelling harm being done by the government in this case.
Maybe some general discussion of neglect in the use of the land might be more compelling to me, but I'm not sure that delays in allocating it to charging stations in particular seems like a grand failure of governance. The soil is contaminated and the government wants to clean it up while they're tearing it up? Next to a planned park apparently? And this is causing harm by... holding up EV charging stations? Not a light rail hub, or walking trails connecting neighborhoods, or cycling infrastructure, or a clinic, but EV charging stations?
> I am inclined to think that this argument could be used to shut down any case study used to critique the bureaucracy.
I guess another way of phrasing my reaction is that I don't find this particular example very compelling in critiquing bureaucracy. Maybe more to my point, the fact that the author presents it as urgent to me sort of ironically underscores the problems with the argument they advance. It's an urgent need to them, but maybe not to the public at large?
It's also maybe worth pointing out the converse is true: the argument in Abundance could be used to shut down any case study used to support the government in being prudent or thorough?
gruez · 5h ago
>In the article the author says we should use "pre-approved vendor lists" or "streamlined approvals" and that sounds great in principle, but could also easily be exploited.
As patio11 would say, "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero". Fraud is bad, but if fighting fraud involves so much red tape that it costs more than whatever petty corruption could ever cost, it's bad.
> for the most part regulations and due process emerged to protect public interests from private capture.
In truth I think it's a mix of this, and the opposite--where private interests have already captured the public good.
FinnLobsien · 6h ago
> In the article the author says we should use "pre-approved vendor lists" or "streamlined approvals" and that sounds great in principle, but could also easily be exploited.
Every kind of regulation can be exploited and is currently being exploited. GDPR led to law firms squeezing money out of neighborhood bars with cease and desists. Government grants spawn companies doing the exact minimum to keep getting grants without building real businesses.
I totally agree that lobbyism is a massive problem (and often the reason we get such complex regulation—they shut out the little players). But any proposed solution will have to be some type of risk.
HEmanZ · 5h ago
“ that for the most part regulations and due process emerged to protect public interests from private capture”
I just flat out don’t buy this. The majority of regulations I see “abundance” type people arguing against were never aimed at curtailing private capture. They are aimed at keeping neihborhoods unchanged for generations, making sure everyone up-and-down society gets veto power over any project regardless of type or upside of it, and making sure arbitrary unrelated “goods” are enforced with as much bureaucracy
as possible during development (the best example of this is trying to get solar panels built and having to fight many years of “environmental” review for something so desperately needed for our environment).
Analemma_ · 6h ago
Has our system done a good job at preventing private capture? Are we better at preventing private capture than countries which build things more easily?
ryathal · 21m ago
Our system is great at preventing private capture at the small scale and great at ensuring it on the large scale
roenxi · 7h ago
It is a weird subject - on the one hand, I don't think anyone would argue that the story in the article makes sense from a process perspective. But simultaneously the people who are of the opinion that the regulations burdens should be lightened seem to be in a political minority that can't be much bigger than around 30% of the population. Raising the question - what do the majority of voters actual think about this sort of regulation? Maybe they are just of the opinion that case studies like this aren't representative of reality.
I'd incline to believe that if the US body politic set out to solve this one they'd end up in a position of introducing a loophole for charging projects (ie, increasing bureaucracy) and reducing the regulatory burden wouldn't be an option.
pikminguy · 5h ago
I think most people have an opinion similar to NIMBYism. Everyone agrees there are too many regulations but no one agrees which ones are the extra. Every rule is someone's highest concern.
That's why part of the argument in Abundance is that current processes give too many people too much veto power. When every issue is someone's pet issue nothing can ever get done.
ajd555 · 6h ago
Great read, and a great example of America's failure to complete infrastructure projects. I agree with the proposed solutions, and I do hope that some local governments start enacting some of them.
I'm reminded of the staggering cost for a new railroad in the US, that can go up to $4M/mile near urban environments[0]. We need more articles like these and some political courage to get building again!
There's a lot in my city that had construction going on for about a month, they barely got anywhere, and now it's been deserted for a while. It's meant to be a new block of flats, and I know that takes a while, but every time I pass it, I think about the stories of Chinese workers erecting a 57 storey building in 19 days (Though I don't know if that includes wiring, plumbing, etc, or if it's just the concrete shell)
WBrentWilliams · 6h ago
Writ-large, isn't what the article is referring to the plot of 生きる(Ikiru, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiru)? My suspicion is that the solution to lack of ability for government to enable building in the US will be the same, writ-large, as in the movie. That is, it will happen, but (I'll stop here, least I spoil the movie for you).
Peteragain · 6h ago
As a leftie - admittedly one who thinks - I thought the article was actually quite positive and didn't bring politics into it: "What would that look like for something as simple as EV charging stations? Standardized approval processes. Pre-approved vendor lists. Streamlined permitting for routine infrastructure. Clear timelines with accountability mechanisms."
A clear and sensible suggestion. Cool.
FinnLobsien · 6h ago
I think state capacity shouldn't be a left-right issue. Whether you want oil rigs or public parks to be built, everyone can agree that once the decision is made, it should be built swiftly and well.
And the public should be able to have an expectation that when the government says they'll do something, they're capable of doing so within a reasonable budget and timeframe.
HEmanZ · 5h ago
In my neck of the woods, you’d be called a capitalist bootlicker for this point of view by many lefties. I get called that for basically any suggestion besides complete communist revolution.
I can always tell who on the left is ideologically poisoned by how vehemently they hate anything related to the idea that current government processes and regulations could improve or that government regulations can go (sometimes very) wrong. As if somehow that admission is the same as wanting anarcho-libertarianism.
bee_rider · 4h ago
Where is your neck of the woods? (Vaguely, of course, nobody wants to reveal where they live on the internet). I spent a lot of time in New England college towns (the region is stereotyped as very blue, and so are college students), but didn’t much like that. The activists I knew were… not so interested in infighting that they’d turn away anyone who was willing to canvass.
Maybe it is a West Coast thing though, stuff seems more acrimonious out there.
bee_rider · 56m ago
There’s a typo in my post but the edit window has closed:
> I spent a lot of time in New England college towns […], but didn’t much like that.
I meant
> I spent a lot of time in New England college towns […], but didn’t see much like that.
With that being liberal vs leftist infighting. I loved living in New England college towns, they are great. You can walk to a cafe or a bar, it’s like being in another country.
kayodelycaon · 5h ago
As a “liberal” (American definition), you’re in a far different bubble than I am.
shazbotter · 5h ago
I'm an American, in my circles "liberal" is almost a curse word. It's what we tend to call people who support corporate power, profit motivation, and social progress as long as it doesn't inconvenience them personally.
We broadly use "leftist" to refer to ourselves, whether that's democratic socialists, anarchists, communists, syndicalists, unionists, etc. Philosophically, these folks are fundamentally pushing for wellbeing of all, social motivation, and social progress even if it inconveniences me personally.
I don't think it's helpful to refer to these differences in ideology as bubbles, though. I think there's a very real philosophical difference between liberals and leftists, and has been for generations. 60 years ago Phil Ochs sang "Love me I'm a liberal", and it wasn't a new idea back then. Liberals and leftists hold incompatible worldviews. Just like liberals and conservatives do. I think deploying the term "bubble" for such broad groups is probably more reductive than helpful.
shazbotter · 5h ago
I'm a lefty, but off the anarchist stripe, if you start calling for communist revolution I'll be there to oppose you. ;)
But more seriously, I think we could do a lot more with local governments and our capacity to build things. Part of that is regulatory, but a I think a majority of the problem is we focus too much on getting a thing built and not enough on continuing to run it. Whether it's housing, transportation, bridges, whatever, everyone is excited for opening day then we immediately start paring back funding and support for it. Which results in loss of quality, which makes people go "why are we even paying for this", which leads to loss of funding.
bjackman · 7h ago
An idle observation about bureaucracy:
In my big tech job we have a pretty small (by public sector standards) red-tape burden but it does exist. It does slow work down and it does increase the activation energy such that some small projects that might otherwise happen simply don't.
Sometimes, I choose to semi-transparrently ignore it. I see this happen at the institutional level too. So there's a spectrum of tactical non-compliance, extending roughly between:
- I do not submit my conference material to PR/legal, I just go to the conference and present without approval. I admit this to my management chain, they are mildly uncomfortable about it but ultimately don't care enough to make my life difficult.
To:
- We have a policy stating that all open source code in our stack must be fully reviewed internally. I think this does genuinely happen for lots of libraries but for the Linux kernel we are in flagrant violation and nobody cares.
I assume there are very good reasons this is not something you can just do in the public sector. I assume there's also a factor in there about how there is no serious constituency in my company that genuinely cares about the PR/legal approvals, whereas the regulations blocking parking spaces are probably ultimately due to someone who really does care about whatever they are supposed to represent.
And yeah I guess I do like the rule of law, I prefer that our governments don't break it. But maybe there's something there.
M95D · 3h ago
In my country, obtaining a permit to build something is so very complicated and long that most people prefer to just build and then pay the fine for building without permits.
shazbotter · 5h ago
The article highlights a failure, which is good, but gives a very surface level review of what failed here. Some gestures are made at environmental review but it's not clear that the root cause here was regulation. If the project needed three redesigns, why? Maybe electrical capacity for 8 high capacity outlets on that site was tricky. Maybe the transformers and their cooling was louder than that site could accommodate. Maybe this was a low priority project and other things kept stealing time from it.
I can think of many reasons why a project like this stalls. And too be clear, regulation could absolutely be one of them. The article just doesn't support that as a root cause beyond conjecture.
mindslight · 3h ago
Spot on. I read the article wondering when they were going to describe what specifically failed or got stuck. Instead it's just a vague implication that such redesigns must have been unnecessary, but never saying exactly why such redesigns were being done. What/who is the project currently waiting on? It's never specified.
In light of that, maybe a better description of the problem is more the absence of responsibility/accountability (for both the proponent and the reviewers, although it's not indicated which is dropping the ball here) rather than the processes/regulations themselves.
No comments yet
djoldman · 6h ago
I find it quite interesting that US private industry can be incredibly effective relative to non-US private industry, but the opposite seems to be more the case when it comes to government projects.
dweinus · 5h ago
The idea of US private efficiency is overblown. It doesn't take long working in a large US company to see massive delays, red tape, duplicate work, self-sabotage, or favoritism. Even when it is fast, that doesn't equate to efficient. It's not uncommon to see 8 figures put into throw-away work.
kayodelycaon · 5h ago
I’ve seen massive waste in private business. Incredible amounts of it. Somehow these companies don’t collapse.
Sometimes I think the only real difference is it’s easier to sell stuff to upper management than it is to a congresscritter. Easier for one person to waste a lot of money than it is for a committee to do it.
gruez · 5h ago
>Sometimes I think the only real difference is it’s easier to sell stuff to upper management than it is to a congresscritter. Easier for one person to waste a lot of money than it is for a committee to do it.
How does this square with congressional pork like the SLS[1], or buying tanks that the army doesn't want[2]?
> And yet here we are, three years later, staring at an empty lot.
By way of comparison, Project Gemini was conceived in 1961 and Gemini 3 successfully flew in April of 1964.
But I'm sure that 8 EV parking spots is a more complex endeavor somehow...
bigDinosaur · 7h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality has been noted for a long time. Unfortunately much bigger projects are now affected in ways that perhaps they would not have been in the past.
readthenotes1 · 7h ago
"It’s about rebuilding government’s capacity to accomplish its basic functions efficiently and effectively."
That is a fairly hopeless aspiration as systems inevitably evolve to perpetuate themselves, not the services they were created to provide.
praestigiare · 5h ago
I think that framing this as hopeless, and perpetuating the idea the government cannot operate efficiently, is a part of the problem. If a system is created to provide a service, it makes sense that said system would consider its existence instrumental to meeting that goal. This could be a positive motivator to provide the service efficiently and effectively. There are many reasons that it often does not work out that way, but one is public perception that government is supposed to be slow and inefficient.
xnx · 5h ago
Not a great example since building and maintaining an EV station is not something Seattle should be doing.
Cities have no experience building or maintaining charging stations.
swiftcoder · 5h ago
Regardless of whether the City of Seattle should be in the EV charging station business, once they decide to, they damn well ought to be in the Getting Things Done™ business
shazbotter · 5h ago
The city runs a municipal electrical utility (Seattle City Light), so building and maintaining electrical infrastructure is absolutely something they both have experience with and should be doing.
xnx · 4h ago
Why EV parking spaces and not a laundromat (which uses electricity)?
shazbotter · 3h ago
Because an EV lot is delivering power to a point (the charger) and parking is a business the city regularly operates. There's nothing novel to the city there.
A laundromat does take power routing, and there would be sufficient expertise to do that part, but operating a laundromat is a business the city has never done before. It requires knowledge of machines, customer traffic, laundry care, and a bunch of other stuff the city hasn't done.
-I think we underestimate the impact of the cultural assumption that anything the government does will be 10x as expensive, take 10x as long and then not work properly, with nobody ever being held accountable, but lots of people having been paid along the way.
Of all the ambitious, smart people I know, a single one has said he even believes it's a good thing to work for the government. And he doesn't do it because he thinks the experience would be so miserable compared to working in tech.
-Most people don't seem to understand that regulations don't just add up, but compound.
It's not that each individual, well-intentioned regulation is bad (though some are), it's that many regulations intersect and create edge cases.
And when there's regulation/paperwork at every point, it starts to look like an insurmountable barrier. This is true with entrepreneurship in Europe. People aren't against a specific regulation, the perception is that whatever you want to do, you'll have to ask permission from someone, somewhere, fill out 5 pages of paperwork and wait 3 months before you get to talk to a notary and finally change your business' mailing address (real example from Germany)
-It's hard to make a rational case for this because humans are wired to weigh danger more heavily than upside.
We don't have counterfactuals (the cafe that didn't open because of zoning laws, the parks that were never built, etc.)
Even when politicians admit this problem, they then proclaim they want more housing, innovation or whatever, but getting rid of a regulation has some amount of risk.
So then they try to find the "free lunch": a solution that has none of the downside, but all of the upside.
That free lunch doesn't exist and the resulting solution only gets even more complex.
I've worked for the US federal government, big tech and another big corp. I would say my experience with the government (and the non tech big corp) was more positive than big tech, as my team was more focused on working/growing together rather than trying to individually outshine everyone else. I feel like we were working towards practical goals that has clear benefits for our customers rather than trying to hit seemingly arbitrary kpi's.
Working for the government I also feel like my work/life balance was most respected as well. YMMV though. Admittedly, N=1 here.
the levels of waste and BS and general suck at some large mining + O&G companies was astounding, on top of being absolutely brutal, miserable places to work.
Plus, I'm in Europe and my friend runs his own startup, so very different environment.
One of the reasons American and German cities are made for cars is because of the influence of their car industry. However, this also pushed out investment in competing alternatives like public transport infrastructure.
EV sales are in the middle of a nationwide decline, especially for one of the major manufacturers. I doubt it has anything to do with the 8-space parking lot in Seattle in particular. Add to this stories about charging station compatibility, and I'm not surprised there isn't a greater sense of urgency from the city.
I have my pet projects I'd like to see finished as well, but I don't blame my municipality for not prioritizing them. They have a lot on their plate. It has nothing to do with capture or overregulation, but priorities with constrained staff, budget, and time. People change their minds and city priorities change with popular sentiment.
In some ways, this is a good example of why some prudence is warranted, and maybe you should get the other side of the story. The essay neglects to mention that four of the eight charging stations would be owned by Tesla for example — something that if you're not opposed to, you might at least admit is reasonable for the city to reevaluate — and there is apparently contaminated soil at least nearby the site.
I'm generally in favor of reregulation or deregulation, but I generally feel like land use, environmental, and public space or resources are something where there should be a lot of scrutiny and layers of approval. Once it's gone, it's hard to reclaim and expensive to clean up. I also feel like many examples of complaints in this area and mention of things like Abundance are just like this — someone complains their personal project of interest isn't done fast enough, criticizing the government for being cumbersome and overwrought, while neglecting to mention all the reasons why people might not prioritize their pet project, or why their pet project might reasonably be seen as requiring safeguards or approval processes. The reason why the government is slow with your pet project is because not everyone agrees with you, and there is a commons issue involved.
Meanwhile, discussion about deregulation of things that actually involve personal choice, with little or no public commons issues involved, like medical care, go by the wayside and are never mentioned, or are even hyperregulated.
No, I think the "other side of the story" here is laughably weak. Four measly charging stations in the whole city of Seattle owned by Tesla? That barely warrants a comment on Hacker News, much less a town hall.
And "contaminated land"? How contaminated are we talking about here? It's crippling to any hope of widespread brownfield redevelopment that something so minimally invasive could be shut down by nebulous, ill-defined contamination. Perhaps we need a standard grading system for land contamination instead of just lumping gasoline and arsenic in the same category.
>I am just as inclined to believe that this is some small pet project of interest to the author, who no one else really cares about, and he's invoking some grand criticism of government writ large as a way of bringing urgency and grandeur his idiosyncratic interest that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
I am inclined to think that this argument could be used to shut down any case study used to critique the bureaucracy. The idea that eight city-owned parking spaces are somehow personally important to anyone is weird enough to demand at least a little evidence.
I think that's maybe what I'm saying? Or the other side of the coin? I personally don't think there's some compelling harm being done by the government in this case.
Maybe some general discussion of neglect in the use of the land might be more compelling to me, but I'm not sure that delays in allocating it to charging stations in particular seems like a grand failure of governance. The soil is contaminated and the government wants to clean it up while they're tearing it up? Next to a planned park apparently? And this is causing harm by... holding up EV charging stations? Not a light rail hub, or walking trails connecting neighborhoods, or cycling infrastructure, or a clinic, but EV charging stations?
> I am inclined to think that this argument could be used to shut down any case study used to critique the bureaucracy.
I guess another way of phrasing my reaction is that I don't find this particular example very compelling in critiquing bureaucracy. Maybe more to my point, the fact that the author presents it as urgent to me sort of ironically underscores the problems with the argument they advance. It's an urgent need to them, but maybe not to the public at large?
It's also maybe worth pointing out the converse is true: the argument in Abundance could be used to shut down any case study used to support the government in being prudent or thorough?
As patio11 would say, "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero". Fraud is bad, but if fighting fraud involves so much red tape that it costs more than whatever petty corruption could ever cost, it's bad.
[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
In truth I think it's a mix of this, and the opposite--where private interests have already captured the public good.
Every kind of regulation can be exploited and is currently being exploited. GDPR led to law firms squeezing money out of neighborhood bars with cease and desists. Government grants spawn companies doing the exact minimum to keep getting grants without building real businesses.
I totally agree that lobbyism is a massive problem (and often the reason we get such complex regulation—they shut out the little players). But any proposed solution will have to be some type of risk.
I just flat out don’t buy this. The majority of regulations I see “abundance” type people arguing against were never aimed at curtailing private capture. They are aimed at keeping neihborhoods unchanged for generations, making sure everyone up-and-down society gets veto power over any project regardless of type or upside of it, and making sure arbitrary unrelated “goods” are enforced with as much bureaucracy as possible during development (the best example of this is trying to get solar panels built and having to fight many years of “environmental” review for something so desperately needed for our environment).
I'd incline to believe that if the US body politic set out to solve this one they'd end up in a position of introducing a loophole for charging projects (ie, increasing bureaucracy) and reducing the regulatory burden wouldn't be an option.
That's why part of the argument in Abundance is that current processes give too many people too much veto power. When every issue is someone's pet issue nothing can ever get done.
[0] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/commentary-do-you-want-to-...
And the public should be able to have an expectation that when the government says they'll do something, they're capable of doing so within a reasonable budget and timeframe.
I can always tell who on the left is ideologically poisoned by how vehemently they hate anything related to the idea that current government processes and regulations could improve or that government regulations can go (sometimes very) wrong. As if somehow that admission is the same as wanting anarcho-libertarianism.
Maybe it is a West Coast thing though, stuff seems more acrimonious out there.
> I spent a lot of time in New England college towns […], but didn’t much like that.
I meant
> I spent a lot of time in New England college towns […], but didn’t see much like that.
With that being liberal vs leftist infighting. I loved living in New England college towns, they are great. You can walk to a cafe or a bar, it’s like being in another country.
We broadly use "leftist" to refer to ourselves, whether that's democratic socialists, anarchists, communists, syndicalists, unionists, etc. Philosophically, these folks are fundamentally pushing for wellbeing of all, social motivation, and social progress even if it inconveniences me personally.
I don't think it's helpful to refer to these differences in ideology as bubbles, though. I think there's a very real philosophical difference between liberals and leftists, and has been for generations. 60 years ago Phil Ochs sang "Love me I'm a liberal", and it wasn't a new idea back then. Liberals and leftists hold incompatible worldviews. Just like liberals and conservatives do. I think deploying the term "bubble" for such broad groups is probably more reductive than helpful.
But more seriously, I think we could do a lot more with local governments and our capacity to build things. Part of that is regulatory, but a I think a majority of the problem is we focus too much on getting a thing built and not enough on continuing to run it. Whether it's housing, transportation, bridges, whatever, everyone is excited for opening day then we immediately start paring back funding and support for it. Which results in loss of quality, which makes people go "why are we even paying for this", which leads to loss of funding.
In my big tech job we have a pretty small (by public sector standards) red-tape burden but it does exist. It does slow work down and it does increase the activation energy such that some small projects that might otherwise happen simply don't.
Sometimes, I choose to semi-transparrently ignore it. I see this happen at the institutional level too. So there's a spectrum of tactical non-compliance, extending roughly between:
- I do not submit my conference material to PR/legal, I just go to the conference and present without approval. I admit this to my management chain, they are mildly uncomfortable about it but ultimately don't care enough to make my life difficult.
To:
- We have a policy stating that all open source code in our stack must be fully reviewed internally. I think this does genuinely happen for lots of libraries but for the Linux kernel we are in flagrant violation and nobody cares.
I assume there are very good reasons this is not something you can just do in the public sector. I assume there's also a factor in there about how there is no serious constituency in my company that genuinely cares about the PR/legal approvals, whereas the regulations blocking parking spaces are probably ultimately due to someone who really does care about whatever they are supposed to represent.
And yeah I guess I do like the rule of law, I prefer that our governments don't break it. But maybe there's something there.
I can think of many reasons why a project like this stalls. And too be clear, regulation could absolutely be one of them. The article just doesn't support that as a root cause beyond conjecture.
In light of that, maybe a better description of the problem is more the absence of responsibility/accountability (for both the proponent and the reviewers, although it's not indicated which is dropping the ball here) rather than the processes/regulations themselves.
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Sometimes I think the only real difference is it’s easier to sell stuff to upper management than it is to a congresscritter. Easier for one person to waste a lot of money than it is for a committee to do it.
How does this square with congressional pork like the SLS[1], or buying tanks that the army doesn't want[2]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Criticism
[2] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/12/18/congress-agai...
By way of comparison, Project Gemini was conceived in 1961 and Gemini 3 successfully flew in April of 1964.
But I'm sure that 8 EV parking spots is a more complex endeavor somehow...
That is a fairly hopeless aspiration as systems inevitably evolve to perpetuate themselves, not the services they were created to provide.
Cities have no experience building or maintaining charging stations.
A laundromat does take power routing, and there would be sufficient expertise to do that part, but operating a laundromat is a business the city has never done before. It requires knowledge of machines, customer traffic, laundry care, and a bunch of other stuff the city hasn't done.