Scott notes that although citizens generally didn’t have a problem with earlier cities, governments did:
Historically, the relative illegibility to outsiders of some urban neighborhoods has provided a vital margin of political safety from control by outside elites. A simple way of determining whether this margin exists is to ask if an outsider would have needed a local guide in order to find her way successfully. If the answer is yes, then the community or terrain in question enjoys at least a small measure of insulation from outside intrusion. Coupled with patterns of local solidarity, this insulation has proven politically valuable in such disparate contexts as eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century urban riots over bread prices in Europe, the Front de Liberation Nationale’s tenacious resistance to the French in the Casbah of Algiers, and the politics of the bazaar that helped to bring down the Shah of Iran. Illegibility, then, has been and remains a reliable resource for political autonomy
This was a particular problem in Paris, which was famous for a series of urban insurrections in the 19th century (think Les Miserables, but about once every ten years or so). Although these generally failed, they were hard to suppress because locals knew the “terrain” and the streets were narrow enough to barricade. Slums full of poor people gathered together formed tight communities where revolutionary ideas could easily spread. The late 19th-century redesign of Paris had the explicit design of destroying these areas and splitting up poor people somewhere far away from the city center where they couldn’t do any harm.
Scott ties this into another High Modernist creation: the collective farms of the Soviet Union. This was a terrible idea and responsible for the famines that killed millions (tens of millions?) during Stalin’s administration. The government went ahead with them because the non-collectivized farmers were too powerful and independent a political bloc. They lived in tight-knit little villages that did their own thing, the Party officials who went to these villages to keep order often ended up “going native”, and the Soviets had no way of knowing how much food the farmers were producing and whether they were giving enough of it to the Motherland.
The collectivized farms couldn’t grow much, but people were thrown together in artificial towns designed to make it impossible to build any kind of community: there was nowhere to be except in bed asleep, working in the fields, or at the public school receiving your daily dose of state propaganda. The towns were identical concrete buildings on a grid, which left the locals maximally disoriented (because there are no learnable visual cues) and the officials maximally oriented (because even a foreigner could go to the intersection of Street D and Street 7). All fields were perfectly rectangular and produced Standardized Food Product, so it was (theoretically) easy to calculate how much they should be producing and whether people were meeting that target. And everyone was in the same place, so if there were some sort of problem it was much easier to bring in the army or secret police than if they were split up among a million tiny villages in the middle of nowhere.
Confronting a tumultuous, footloose, and “headless” rural society which was hard to control and which had few political assets, the Bolsheviks, like the scientific foresters, set about redesigning their environment with a few simple goals in mind. They created, in place of what they had inherited, a new landscape of large, hierarchical, state-managed farms whose cropping patterns and procurement quotas were centrally mandated and whose population was, by law, immobile. The system thus devised served for nearly sixty years as a mechanism for procurement and control at a massive cost in stagnation, waste, demoralization, and ecological failure.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Seeing Like a State”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-03-16.
April 21, 2019
QotD: High Modern city design as a tool to control the populace
April 20, 2019
QotD: They used to be called the Jet Set, but now they’re the Transnational Elite
… there is a certain level of pride that attaches to being ignorant of those one considers his inferiors. After all, it’s the natural duty of the simple shopkeeper to know the names of the Great Lords, but it is not the duty of the Great Lords to know the names of the shopkeepers. In fact, it’s the Great Lords’ class obligation to go out of their way not to know the names of the shopkeepers, because this Duty to Know flows in one direction — upwards — and hence ignorance of one’s lessers tends to solidify and reify the assumptions of certain castes being superior to others. It makes certain that everyone understands who’s important, and who’s not.
(I know, I sound like a communist — I can’t help it. I have to agree with Dennis the Peasant — “I mean, class is what it’s all about.” I guess I would say I’m agreeing with the communist critique of the rigid reification of class structures, but I happen to think the communists and their pink fellow travelers have largely captured the upper classes. I guess by my theory they’re so good at this because they’ve spent so long plotting vengeance for the exact same slights (which they largely imagined). In a similar way they’ve gotten quite good at blacklisting and guilt-by-association, eh?)
At any rate, it is your duty to know the values and customs of living of Piers Morgan, but due to his high station (ahem) he is proudly ignorant of yours. As is so often the case in our increasingly dysfunctional and nasty politics — in which certain parties refuse to even admit that their opponents are free citizens entitled to have beliefs at all — the Out-Classes are deemed all-but-officially Beneath Notice.
Michael Totten has written a crackerjack piece — or at least I think it is — about this principle in action among our foreign policy sages, the internationalist “elite.” He detects the exact same sort of phenomenon going on when the International “elite” visit foreign nations — because anyone who doesn’t share 90% of their cultural values (and the wealth that permits/encourages these values — the International Elite is not middle-class!) is beneath notice and not worth knowing about, they don’t bother asking anyone but the 3% of the population which largely shares their beliefs and cultural inputs about their intentions and their political agenda.
Which means, in Egypt, they only ask the jet-setting wealthy Westernized elite about the prognosis for Egyptian democracy. And in Lebanon, they only ask the educated, urbane population of Beirut about their desires for the country.
And they ignore all the “Dirty People,” the low people who aren’t worth networking with and probably wouldn’t be any fun to have a sexual affair with. Unfortunately — and this has huge consequences for American foreign policy — it turns out those Dirty Poor People greatly, greatly outnumber the small coteries of educated elites that cluster in every capital country.
And so our “elites” — and honestly, we need to start looking for a more accurate discriptor — come back with completely-wrong information about foreign countries.
Why, as Totten says (changing the words a bit), “All of these Egyptians are swell, educated, moderate, sexually-loose cosmopolitans! Why, democracy has a smashing chance of working out here!”
Yeah, not so much. Not so much.
Ace, “The Unburstable Bubble of Willful Ignorance of the International Self-Purported Elites”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2013-01-09.
April 19, 2019
QotD: The revolution will be YouTubed, which might snuff it out before it gets underway
I think that a number of factors will ultimately tamp it down [campus protests/riots]. The ability of people to record videos of police has been a tremendous spur to calls for reform. But police are not the only people who can be filmed in public; so can protesters. I suspect that as people discover what can happen when future employers google up videos of you shouting “[expletive deleted] the police” or screaming at professors and speakers, the costs of this sort of protest will rise, and there will be less of it. Moreover, I suspect that both alumni and state funding for schools where this sort of thing happens a lot will often decline, putting pressure on administrators to curb it.
Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.
April 18, 2019
QotD: Roadblocks to deregulating the US healthcare market
One problem America has is simply that our government administration isn’t very good. That’s not true across the board — our government statistics are, IMHO, the finest in the world. But there’s stuff that other countries can do that we can’t, either because our government is more decentralized, or because our civil service just isn’t as prestigious (and therefore as full of competent, motivated people) as those in other countries. And our regulatory approach — rules rather than principles based, and highly adversarial — is also suboptimal, and hard to change.
Given how much the government now interferes in health care, that’s a big problem. Given our lack of administrative competency, our first step should be pulling back where we can — trying to push more ordinary expenses onto consumers, for example, who can manage those the same way they manage their aspirin and antacid purchases now. And eliminating the tax deduction for employer sponsored health care would be major. But I fear, politically impossible.
Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.
April 17, 2019
QotD: “[E]valuating food by its calorie count is like evaluating literature by the number of pages in a book”
… calorie-counting is an ineffective approach to eating. Calories are a crude metric that takes into account nothing about the properties of foods other than the total energy they contain. The value of activities can’t be reduced to a number, and nor can foods. Still calories are listed everywhere, enumerated in enormous fonts on food packaging and across menus and ads for packaged products with nothing to recommend them but a lack of calories.
A calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Celsius. The “calories” we talk about in food are the amount of energy released when that food is burned. Of course the first law of thermodynamics applies to humans, so if you take in less energy than you use, it’s impossible to store that energy (as body fat). But the factors that go into energy balance are many. The body burns and stores energy from different foods in different forms at different times in different people in different ways.
That crudity leads to mistakes, like the idea that 200 calories of Skittles are in any way equivalent to 200 calories of salad. In that way, calories have been weaponized by marketers to claim their ingestible products are innocuous. As Coca-Cola has advertised, for one, drinking soda is fine as long as you exercise enough to burn off those calories. That’s reasonable if it weren’t also true that constant exposure to high-sugar foods changes the way our bodies store energy. It’s like saying it’s fine to insult someone as long as you follow it with a compliment.
Worse still are the loudly advertised “100-calorie” packs of sugar-based edible products. They cause insulin levels to surge, affecting nutrient absorption and subsequent hunger in ways fundamentally different from eating 100 calories of almonds or spinach. That’s so much spinach. It would fill your stomach and please the microbes of your bowel.
James Hamblin, “It’s True, Hot Baths Burn Calories: Why calorie counting is almost useless and often misleading”, The Atlantic, 2017-04-13.
April 16, 2019
QotD: Romania and the Nazi Final Solution
Last place goes to Romania, which had been anti-Semitic since the beginning of time and was genuinely excited to have Nazi orders as an excuse to carry out their own worse impulses:
In Rumania even the S.S. were taken aback, and occasionally frightened, by the horrors of old-fashioned, spontaneous pogroms on a gigantic scale; they often intervened to save Jews from sheer butchery, so that the killing could be done in what, according to them, was a civilized way.
The Romanians started their own concentration camps to supplement the Nazi’s, “more elaborate and atrocious affairs than anything we know of in Germany”, but they didn’t always need them – “deportation Rumanian style consisted in herding five thousand people into freight cars and letting them die there of suffocation while the train traveled through the countryside without plan or aim for days on end; a favorite followup to these killing operations was to expose the corpses in Jewish butcher shops.” Things became so bad that Nazi emissary Manfred von Killinger, intervened and asked them to stop and defer to German efforts. I feel like when a Nazi named Commander von Killinger is horrified by your brutality, it’s time to take a step back and evaluate whether you may have crossed a line.
Other interesting profiles include Greece (hopelessly depressing), Slovakia (very Catholic, in favor of killing Jews but got in a bunch of fights with the Nazis about ethnic Jews who had been baptized into Catholicism), Hungary (ruled by an Admiral despite being landlocked; otherwise hopelessly depressing), Belgium (deliberately left the trains unlocked so the Jews could escape!), Holland (kind of like France; the local Gentiles tried to help, but the assimilated Jews sold out the refugee Jews in the hope of placating the Nazis; the Nazis were not placated; three-quarters of Jews died), and Poland (I don’t even want to talk about how hopelessly depressing this one is).
Scott Alexander, “Book review: Eichmann in Jerusalem”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-01-30.
April 15, 2019
QotD: De Gaulle and the BBC
Above all he loved France, or the idea of it. He saw in the defeat of 1940 a danger that his country would simply disappear, having failed to defend itself and having fled from the battle without properly drawing its sword. This was not a foolish fear. Great civilizations can and do vanish, and one of the best ways of doing so is to abandon the struggle to survive.
He must have greatly resented the fact that he owed so much to Britain. He was intelligent enough to know that Britain, a country few Frenchmen can ever fully trust, was his best hope and only refuge. He understood, as many French patriots could not, that the terrible attack on the French fleet by the British Navy at Mers-el-Kébir in 1940 was in fact necessary, in case its great ships fell into the hands of the Germans. He would have done the same himself had the position been reversed, and he knew it. It was this generosity of mind that made him great. But how he must have loathed being dependent on the British Broadcasting Corporation for his access to the French people. For it was the BBC that made him. Until he finally appeared for the tumultuous, ecstatic liberation of Paris in 1944, he was only a voice, heard fleetingly on illegal broadcasts. Almost nobody in France had the faintest idea what he looked like. But all had a certain idea of de Gaulle, the spirit of France that refused to surrender. And when they finally saw this towering, fearless figure walking calmly down the Champs-Élysées amid the snipers’ bullets, he did not disappoint them. He was, it turned out, a giant so tall that one could imagine ice forming on his upper slopes when—as so often happened—he was annoyed or impatient with his people. His great height set him apart from the beginning. He once complained, “We giants are never at ease with others … the armchairs are always too small, the tables too low, the impression one makes too strong.”
Peter Hitchens, “A Certain Idea of France”, First Things, 2019-04.
April 14, 2019
April 13, 2019
QotD: School vouchers
I am still a supporter of school vouchers. I don’t think they’ve lived up to the hopes that I (and a bunch of other folks) had for them. But that said, the best opponents can say is that they don’t do all that much better than the public schools on academic measures. Parents like them, kids like them, and they cost less. I just don’t see a good argument against them.
I think it’s telling that of the folks I know who oppose vouchers, not one of them has voluntarily kept their kids in a failing urban school. When they move, they choose a house in a good school district. I don’t see how you can morally do that and then tell some other, poorer parent that they need to lean into the strike zone and take one for the team.
That said, maybe there’s an argument for restricting them to kids in failing schools, or below a certain income. I don’t see any need for the government to subsidize Exeter. But for the kids who are trapped, I think they should get the same chance middle class kids do, even if it’s not the panacea we once hoped.
Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.
April 12, 2019
QotD: Money is not wealth
If you want to create wealth, it will help to understand what it is. Wealth is not the same thing as money.* Wealth is as old as human history. Far older, in fact; ants have wealth. Money is a comparatively recent invention.
Wealth is the fundamental thing. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn’t need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing to buy, it wouldn’t matter how much money you had.
Wealth is what you want, not money. But if wealth is the important thing, why does everyone talk about making money? It is a kind of shorthand: money is a way of moving wealth, and in practice they are usually interchangeable. But they are not the same thing, and unless you plan to get rich by counterfeiting, talking about making money can make it harder to understand how to make money.
Money is a side effect of specialization. In a specialized society, most of the things you need, you can’t make for yourself. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to live, you have to get it from someone else.
How do you get the person who grows the potatoes to give you some? By giving him something he wants in return. But you can’t get very far by trading things directly with the people who need them. If you make violins, and none of the local farmers wants one, how will you eat?
The solution societies find, as they get more specialized, is to make the trade into a two-step process. Instead of trading violins directly for potatoes, you trade violins for, say, silver, which you can then trade again for anything else you need. The intermediate stuff — the medium of exchange — can be anything that’s rare and portable. Historically metals have been the most common, but recently we’ve been using a medium of exchange, called the dollar, that doesn’t physically exist. It works as a medium of exchange, however, because its rarity is guaranteed by the U.S. Government.
The advantage of a medium of exchange is that it makes trade work. The disadvantage is that it tends to obscure what trade really means. People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage — just a shorthand — for whatever people want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want.**
* Until recently even governments sometimes didn’t grasp the distinction between money and wealth. Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations, v:i) mentions several that tried to preserve their “wealth” by forbidding the export of gold or silver. But having more of the medium of exchange would not make a country richer; if you have more money chasing the same amount of material wealth, the only result is higher prices.
** There are many senses of the word “wealth,” not all of them material. I’m not trying to make a deep philosophical point here about which is the true kind. I’m writing about one specific, rather technical sense of the word “wealth.” What people will give you money for. This is an interesting sort of wealth to study, because it is the kind that prevents you from starving. And what people will give you money for depends on them, not you.
When you’re starting a business, it’s easy to slide into thinking that customers want what you do. During the Internet Bubble I talked to a woman who, because she liked the outdoors, was starting an “outdoor portal.” You know what kind of business you should start if you like the outdoors? One to recover data from crashed hard disks.
What’s the connection? None at all. Which is precisely my point. If you want to create wealth (in the narrow technical sense of not starving) then you should be especially skeptical about any plan that centers on things you like doing. That is where your idea of what’s valuable is least likely to coincide with other people’s.
Paul Graham, “How to Make Wealth”, Paul Graham, 2004-04.
April 11, 2019
QotD: How to improve David Lynch’s Dune
Dune (1982) is a Lawrence of Arabia pastiche with a mad bucket of half-baked science fiction tropes bolted onto it. It includes so much extraneous, confusing detail from the novel’s world, but when you think of all the things it omits you really get a good sense of why Lynch (or anyone?) could not form it in 2 or 3-hours.
I think there are two things that could be done to fix it. Firstly, remove all the speaking and turn the whole thing into a hallucinatory Lynchean nightmare, perhaps to be accompanied by Brian Eno’s mythic 45-minute album of Dune music. […]
Secondly, use Lynch’s movie as the basis for a full-length animated TV miniseries by rotoscoping it and bringing back the original actors for several hours or so of newly-animated scenes.
Rob Beschizza, “Sorry, David Lynch’s Dune sucks (or does it?)”, Boing Boing, 2017-04-21.
April 10, 2019
QotD: UBI and the “end of work”
I’m sort of skeptically agnostic about the end of work. Yes, this has been predicted before, and never arrived. On the other hand, history is full of stuff that was predicted and didn’t arrive, until suddenly it did. So maybe this time is really different.
And what do we do if it is? I don’t know. I don’t think UBI [Universal Basic Income] is the answer. We have a fair amount of data about what places look like where large numbers of people are subsidized not to work. The answer is “like nowhere you’d want to live”. The predicted flowering of artistic and community endeavor does not arrive; people are depressed, less social, and spend a great deal of time on activities like watching television.
To this, UBI advocates rejoinder “But what about trust fund babies and old-style aristocrats! Everyone admires their lives of leisure!” To which my answer is “Heck no, I don’t”. The lives of the idle rich are better upholstered than the out-of-work poor, but suffer the same absence of meaning and community. They are not a model to which anyone should aspire.
Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.
April 9, 2019
QotD: It won’t be easy to bring back politicians’ willingness to compromise
I think the donors are a problem for both parties, in terms of driving choices that aren’t necessarily the best strategies for building the base. (Both parties completely missed the populist backlash on trade, for example. Now, as a free trader, I like the resulting policy. But they paid for it at the polls.) But the issue isn’t fundamentally the donors. The issue is that fundamentally, both sides hate each other, and both sides have an increasing “It is not enough that I win. My enemies must lose” mentality about politics. Combine that with various reforms that have empowered extremists — campaign finance reforms that empowered outside groups, yes, but also the shift to primaries from conventions, and the abolition of the earmarks and pork that used to grease legislative passage. Throw in the “Great Sort” into increasingly politically homogenous communities — those are the problems you need to fix if you want to bring back legislative compromise. And damned if I know how we get there, because you can’t tell people where to live, and anyone who suggested getting rid of primary elections and bringing back pork barrel politics would come off as a backroom sleaze.
Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.
April 8, 2019
QotD: Why does US healthcare cost so much?
This is a hotly debated question in health care policy. Here’s my rough stab at it: the 1970s inflation interacted particularly badly with two pre-existing policy choices: the tax deduction for employer-sponsored health insurance, and Medicare.
Start with employer-sponsored health insurance, which is, as everyone knows, tax advantaged relative to salary, because your employer can deduct it as an expense, but you don’t have to show it as income on your taxes.
This was an incredibly dumb decision, but in the defense of the folks who made it in the 1940s, at the time, health insurance wasn’t very expensive, because the health care system couldn’t do all that much (and the female labor that ran hospitals was cheap due to discrimination, or in the case of nuns, basically free).
Come the 1970s, inflation started causing a problem called “bracket creep”. Back then tax brackets weren’t indexed for inflation, so as inflation went up, folks got pushed into higher and higher tax brackets, even though the buying power of their salary had stayed the same, or [had] gone down. This was great for the government (and is a big reason our deficits were not disastrous in the 1970s), but it was terrible for people, and led to the tax revolts that helped put Reagan in office.
But I digress. The point is that bracket creep made non-taxed benefits much more attractive relative to salary, so insurance started getting more generous. That process has continued for decades. Insurance used to be “major medical” that covered big ticket items like hospital stays. Now we expect it to cover the cost of going to the doctor for the sniffles. Well, if you insulate people from those costs, they will incur more of them.
Effectively, this raises demand for health care services. But the US system, decentralized and litigation-happy, is very bad at controlling the supply side. End result: high costs.
The other thing that happened is Medicare. The original legislation called for reimbursing services at “reasonable and customary rates”. This was a gold mine for doctors and hospitals. In New York, for example, doctors used to be forced to do charity care as the price of their admitting privileges at prestigious city hospitals. Once Medicare came into the picture, there was no need for that! Or to economize on beds; you could always find someone to fill them. Eventually, Medicare tried to crack down (http://reason.com/archives/2011/12/13/medicare-whac-a-mole), but by then, it was damned hard to cut physician and hospital incomes, in part because they had made decisions based on their — like building new hospitals with all private rooms — that couldn’t be undone. Our cost base is permanently higher, and politically, we have shown no will to slash provider incomes. So even though our growth rate is about average for the OECD, we’re growing from a much higher level.
Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.
April 7, 2019
QotD: Good writers and bad
Thinking about it, what often makes a writer good, is that they avoid the things that all bad writers seem to share. In this sense, “good” is not a state in itself, but simply not being in the state we call “bad.” A great wordsmith is further away from the state of bad writing than someone who is just an average writer. That average writer can appear to be much better, by offering keen insights and clever observations. The path to becoming a good writer, therefore, starts with avoiding the things that define a bad writer.
The most common trait of bad writers, it seems, is they write about themselves. Unless you are an international man of mystery, you’re not that interesting. No one is. Bad writers, always seem to think they are the most interesting people they know. This is what made former President Obama such a boring speaker. No matter the subject, his speech was going to be a meditation on his thoughts and feelings about the subject. It became a game of sorts to count how many times he referenced himself in a speech.
That’s the hallmark of bad writing. Instead of focusing on the subject, the writer focuses on himself, which suggests he does not know the material. Even when relating an experience or conversation, the good writer makes himself a secondary character in the story, not the focus. Bad writers are always the hero of everything they write, as if they are trying to convince the reader of something about themselves. Good writers avoid this and focus on the subject of their writing.
The Z Man, “How To Be A Bad Writer”, The Z Blog, 2019-03-03.
