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Why hasn't the past half century been filled with at least trying new things? What happened to laboratories of democracy? Although I admit I have a slight repulsion to the thought of a few billionaires being able to wield almost complete autonomy...

You've just answered your own question. In America, we believe it is illegitimate for any city or state government to not be a democracy. And democracy in practice means rule by a web of committees and bureaucracies. (Electing a strongman to cut through all of this is considered anti-democratic.)

But building an innovative product, whether that be an iphone or a new kind of city, requires directly responsible individuals ( https://medium.com/@mmamet/directly-responsible-individuals-... ). It cannot be design by committee. It requires having a singular will with the power to overrule the squabbling factions that just want to protect their own interests.

If you want innovation in the way cities are built and managed, you need cities to be able to have a Steve Jobs/Bill Gates-like CEO with powers far beyond that of any mayor, beyond the powers of any city government. But our current ideology of democracy does not allow for that.

I think you’re reversing cause and effect.

If a bunch of anarchists or communists had access to a few billion dollars in capital, I have no doubt they could build innovative environments.

We live in a culture that concentrates capital in the hands of autocratic industrialists. They’re the ones with capital, but it doesn’t follow their management style is the only way to innovate.

There a long history of planned towns and cities, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_planned_cities. The USA appears to be one of the most innovative but that is hardly surprising given the availability of land.

In the UK, planned towns have a long and venerable history as a means of social improvement. If you look at smaller communities then there are good examples of corporate involvement, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Sunlight.

There is always a dark side to this. Brora in Sutherland, Scotland was subject to a number of improvements for the betterment of the population by George Granville Leveson-Gower, the first Duke of Sutherland, http://www.scottish-highlands-explorer.com/brora.asp which also included https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Sutherland#Clearances

> The USA appears to be one of the most innovative

What's the benchmark there? Is there an organisation doing reviews of planned cities or are you just going by the number of them?

The US have many planned cities/communities, but much of it seems to simply be suburbia set up at once by real estate developers à la Levittowns, it's not exactly Palmanova/Neuf-Brisach (star fort cities) or Louvain-la-Neuve (pedestrian city built on a concrete slab, all motorised traffic is underground).

In addition to planned towns and cities, there are many planned developments that exist within larger cities, such as Battery Park City in New York and Stapleton in Denver.

Well, if history does repeat itself, we’re due for company towns and only a decade out from rampant abuse.

They're back already in the oil fields.

google _is_ building a city:

https://www.wired.com/story/google-sidewalk-labs-toronto-qua...

Isn't it more like they're building a new section of a city?

China in the past 20 years is basically doing real-world reinforcement learning with substantial fraction of exploration phase while US seems to be stuck in the exploitation phase.

If nobody lives in the cities, can the experiments be considered valid?

The whole ghost/empty city in China thing is not really accurate. After some period of time after construction they are occupied. For some reason Western media makes articles about the short interim period.

It'd be akin to writing an article about how a new apartment building is a ghost building just because they hadn't started letting people move in yet.

There's plenty of empty real-estate in China. Maybe not whole cities, but plenty of empty (or mostly empty) buildings that were built years ago.

Oh yea definitely, lot of whole empty stack apartment complexes. Those are freaky to be near, especially the ones where you suspect the builder ran out of money or failed some kind of inspection and the stuff is only like 95% done and already decaying.

Just not whole empty cities...

It's not just cities; it's also ways to do things. So one region is doing German-style operation, another one US-style, another one Italian-style etc. as close as they can reproduce it. The same for education. Then they evaluate what works where and why and adjust/spread the winner.

That's the idea behind the Seasteading Institute - to experiment with news ways of governance.

Except a) the federal government actually doesn’t really interfere much with governance at all, and b) floating on seawater makes almost everything 10x harder.

Which means seasteading is pointless unless you are doing something the federal government really doesn’t like.

90% of problematic regulations are city rules, and another 9% are county level, which means most people can just move to a different city and be completely free to experiment with whatever governance they want, and another 9% will need to switch counties, but only 1% at most need to be on a boat. And frankly many of those are actually anti-social people who aren’t experimenting with governance, they’re incompatible with it.

>Except a) the federal government actually doesn’t really interfere much with governance at all

You’re not serious are you.

> >Except a) the federal government actually doesn’t really interfere much with governance at all

>You’re not serious are you.

The OP was certainly underestimating the influence the US federal government (and federal governments around the world) have on their constituent states, but certainly in the USA, Canada, Australia, etc., subnational and local governments have considerable power which they consistently fail to use in an innovative way. Most subnational entities simply replicate the institutions of their national or sibling polities.

How long do those subnational/local governments keep those powers if they use them in a too "innovative" way?

Well in most federations, until there’s a constitutional change.

> ...subnational and local governments have considerable power which they consistently fail to use in an innovative way.

Yep, tell that to my old sheriff who had the feds all over his ass for messing with the illegal immigrants. And a federal indictment. And a presidential pardon.

Ah, good 'ol Sheriff Joe...

I am. If there’s a form of governance you’d like to experiment with which you can’t legally do in, say, Montana, I would be very interested to hear about it. I would be happy to be proven wrong on this subject.

I love you.

(Edit, because my first reaction may appear creepy by itself. Your comment reads like that speech in `Good Will Hunting` on why he doesn't want to work for the NSA. Or anything written by Aaron Sorkin)

The original concept by the founding fathers was that the US would have countless "laboratories of democracy" and thus what you say echoes the original intent.

However, federal law has grown, and state law and even local law has all become highly standardized. In practice there's very little distinction between regions. America is just one big "stroad."

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2014/01/dangerous-str...

I've noticed this in a sense of town "character". I've lived in New York State, Vermont, and now Colorado, and I can't say there's much of a difference between suburbs. You'd think that three different states would have their own "feel", but for the most part they all seem the same to me. Our towns have no sense of identity.

Disney was never really interested in democracy. His admiration for fascism is pretty well-documented. He even escorted the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl around Hollywood:

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/06/walt-the-quas...

Epcot was to be organized around more or less the same principles as European fascism.

Holding up his plans (or those of Gates) without questioning the fundamental morality of the vast inequality of wealth and power they represent is how America went so far off the rails in the first place.

It's not fair to hold up Gates as an example of how things are unequal. He's using his foundation more effectively than most people to research real solutions to hard societal problems. He's one of the rare instances of rich people who I'd trust to give my money to make the world a factually and legitimately better place, including the concept of a more equal place. In fact, Warren Buffett has promised to give all his money to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So have other rich people. Gates also is a driving cheerleader of The Giving Pledge where rich people commit to giving their fortunes to charity.

> America went so far off the rails

Huh? It was always an owners republic, like Rome before.

For the 2.0 version they upped the advertising budget.

Not a 2.0 version. The was "New Rome" or Constantinople, it was 2.0. What is Rome 3.0 is undecided[1], but I believe that in any case Rome 3.0 now is deep in the history. Deeper that Columbus and discovering of America. Though Mussolini renewed idea with fascist Italy as a Third Rome. So, I believe, that Rome 4.0 is the least version number applicable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Rome

One thing I will give the Roman's, they went out and fought their own wars. No bones spurs there.

Actually, towards the end the Romans were hiring mercenaries, many of them foreign.

Income inequality can be seen as a sign of a healthy capitalist society.

http://paulgraham.com/gap.html

http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

A sign of a healthy capitalist society for some maybe, but not a healthy society in general.

Paul Graham is a wealthy libertarian anyway, so of course he would think that income inequality is not inherently a bad thing, I don't see how pointing to some of his essays proves anything in that regard.

Do you also ignore the arguments for more redistribution from any non-rich person, since they're bound to benefit from it?