Democracy Is the Solution to Vetocracy
sambowman.co
sambowman.co
This shifts the problem from one place to another. Who do you decide gets to vote?
> I realise that this is a very vague categorisation. Who is to decide what “significant” losing out means here? Bear with me, but ultimately that is what I’m going to suggest is the big, interesting research question for anyone who wants to solve vetocracy.
Oh. So the solution is: I don't have a solution so I'm going to move the problem from one place to another and state that it is an interesting question for someone else to solve.
This goes on and on for a ridiculously long article stating how awesome this would be, if we could only accurately identify those affected by change. Sure. Just given a sufficiently smart compiler. Given an omnipotent genie. We can all solve all of the problems when we bury them in some impossible wish.
All we need are the right people to vote. None of the wrong people. And then we can bribe the right people to vote the right way. Then democracy will work. /sarcasm
If your solution to vetocracy is to limit democracy then you aren't using democracy. Democracy becomes subordinate to the mechanism you are using to define the limit. At that point, the mechanism that determines that limit becomes your solution. So hand-waving it away as "an interesting research problem" means that you haven't solved anything at all. You could just as well get rid of democracy and keep only the mechanism of limit and the bribes.
Obviously democracy should be limited to the relevant franchise. We don't let children vote, we don't let people who don't live (and are not from) an area vote. The entire point is to identify the right set of people who should vote, based on those who suffer from the related externalities.
It seems unfair to say the article just moves the problem elsewhere, it touches on proposed solutions such as street-level development votes.
You completely misunderstand the sufficiently smart compiler objection. It is about dodging real problems by proposing magic solutions.
You can't make C/C++ a safe language "just" by writing a sufficiently smart compiler. It requires a new approach and perhaps even a new language like Rust.
> It touches on proposed solutions such as street-level development votes.
That is not a generic solution to the vetocracy problem. That is a specific identification of a group of people that the author of the article believes should be endowed with making a particular decision. There is no general framework proposed for selecting such a group of people in the general case.
Let's consider some possible general mechanisms. The "simple" problem that we "just" have to solve to make the authors otherwise perfect solution work.
We could endow that responsibility on a single individual, such as the author himself. He feels he made a good decision in the street-level case, maybe he can do the same for other cases, like mining rights or cross-country oil pipelines. So whenever the question comes up as to who is affected by such a thing we go to the author of the article and ask him to tell us. Kind of like a dictator or even a King.
Or we put together a committee and they decide between them who is impacted. Kind of like an oligarchy. Or maybe we all get a vote on who is impacted. A democracy to decide who is impacted and who gets the right to vote. It's recursive! Or divide and conquer!
It's starting to sound like picking the mechanism to determine who is impacted by a particular change is a very similar kind of activity to existing political mechanisms. That is suspicious. Maybe it isn't an easy problem to solve after all.
It seems to me the real front line of the debate is whether the problem is in fact made less severe by what’s being suggested. But apparently engaging in that debate isn’t quite as gratifying as attacking the person’s entire framework for finding solutions.
Well, if our arguments are going to devolve into trite cliche then I might trot out: primum non nocere -- First, do no harm.
It is not clear to me that this approach is free from potential harm. On the contrary, limiting people's access to participation seems like the kind of tool a wealthy elite would gladly wield against the poor and disenfranchised. I strongly doubt that it would primarily be used to protect the weak.
I believe the authors intent is to find ways to let people who are influenced the most have the most say. Even then he suggests rolling it out in small experiments which would allow checking the assumptions. If it's harmful, then stop.
Oh get over yourself. I used a “trite cliche” as a way to give a general sense of the point I was trying to make before going into it more detail. Had I responded with only that, sure, that would be devolving the argument, but I didn’t.
> It is not clear to me that this approach is free from potential harm. On the contrary, limiting people's access to participation seems like the kind of tool a wealthy elite would gladly wield against the poor and disenfranchised. I strongly doubt that it would primarily be used to protect the weak.
That’s a strong argument and one that I’m inclined to agree with.
All large democracies use limiting mechanisms, you don't directly vote for most things - which would be a direct democracy, which tends to break down on all but very small scales. All western democracies are a representative democracy, this is already a limiting mechanism, not everything goes everyone's way, we vote for representatives, and hope that they vote for the majority of our interests the majority of the time.
The core argument here seems to be that the catchment area of development (an already pre-existing limiting mechanism) is simply defined too broadly. I don't think identifying people who are genuinely affected from those that have nothing better to do between scoffing tea cakes than complain is worth while - So long as the area is reasonable well defined to not include too many people who are barely affected, then you don't have to worry about separating the tea cakes from the rest.
This is not moving goalposts. The further normal people are away from a development the less shits they give because they have their own problems to deal with.. unfortunately that just leaves the people with nothing better to do, who will complain about literally anything because they already have a house and a pension, seem to have lost all empathy of any struggle they had getting there.
There we go again. I get the feeling you don't feel yourself asking for a magic genie here. Clearly you believe that there is an algorithm to determine a "reasonably well defined area" but are unable to provide one.
My challenge is: please, provide this algorithm that will work in all of the crazy cases that show up, from the small to the large. From a slight densification of a suburban area, to a commercial development like a shopping center or business park, to industrial use areas, to an infrastructure project like a new bridge or airport, to a massive development like a nuclear power plant.
I'm arguing that such an algorithm is beyond the possibility of man. You might as well ask for magic.
But as long as you believe such an algorithm is possible, while also refusing to provide it or to sketch it out, you can fall back on: come on bro, it might be better than what we have now, trust me, stop being such a downer. In fact you can turn it around on me - like asking me to prove it couldn't exist!
Meanwhile, my intuition is that any limits that are enacted to prevent participation will disproportionately advantage the existing elite and wealthy to the detriment of the middle and lower classes.
A catchment area is already being defined based on some rules, it's not magic. That's the place to begin. It's not going to be an algorithm, it's going to be a poor bag of heuristics. Suggesting the existing method needs refinements is not the same as suggesting magic.
I don't know what the term "catchment area" means to you, but I have no idea how that applies in Canada. As of right now, there is no way that I am aware for me to vote on land use rights. That is, I am aware of zoning bylaws that define what I can use land for. The options that I am aware of are: I can apply for rezoning to an alternate existing zoning designation (including parceling out or assemblies) or I can apply for an amendment to the existing zoning bylaw. These are pretty opaque processes but certainly require involving the local district and they definitely involve public hearings, require public notices and invite public comment.
As far as I know, no one locally gets a vote. So this isn't altering an existing process or narrowing it's scope (what I suppose you mean by refining), it is proposing an entirely new process. I can't speak for every jurisdiction in Canada, North America or Europe, but I feel that this isn't just re-drawing some borders. We aren't suddenly going to have councils at the 15 minute walking range, or councils for my street. And even if we did they are going to be more like HOA/Strata councils - which are a nightmare to behold.
Further - this doesn't answer the larger question which everyone wants to dodge. For example, he talks at length about larger infrastructure projects like wind power and energy power-line corridors. That is a kind of thing that spans multiple jurisdictions. How does one coordinate that?
None of that is thought out or proposed, just hand waved away as a "research project".
If we are claiming a process to solve vetocracy - I want to hear about how you are going to coordinate land use rights to build high speed rail. How are you going to manage defining the list of who is affected by that? Otherwise you are just wasting time on toy problems that can be trivially solved in other ways.
Good grief.
Authorities which span and overlap other jurisdictions are common enough. In the small, water, conservation, school, fire, etc.
I think of regional and intrastate arrangements as like treaties. But I'm mosdef not a lawyer, so my analogy is prob more weong than right.
1 km is actually a pretty big circle, so there would probably be room for multiple circle sizes based on the proposed development size. Adding 50 housing units is a 5 minute concern. Adding 1000 is a 15 minute one.
No thoughts on heroin clinics or other social services initiatives. No thoughts on sensitive land issues like protected water-ways. No thoughts on major regional infrastructure initiatives. No thoughts on industry needs (e.g. pipelines).
Also not a general purpose solution to vetocracy. Now you just have an idea to handle squabbles in middle-class suburbs. That kind of thinking won't get high-speed rail built in California, so good luck.
A diliberative body (council, legislature) selects a bunch of people (sortition), gives them a charter (scope of work), empower sthem to investigate (interview experts, research, dig into a problem). The assembly/jury writes up their conclusions and recommendations. The empowering body then acts or not.
All work and meetings are public.
Early experiences have been very encouraging.
This is most of political theory in a nutshell. Whenever you see "The solution is..." just apply this template.
It’s an easy case to make that always comes with pretty intense debate. Assume that…but with everything.
EDIT: To be clear, this is an example to show where this path leads. Not something I'm advocating.
Since we cannot exclude people from voting, well, that everybody can vote, directly on indirectly on almost everything is actually a good thing.
They shouldn't need to be qualified or emotionally not involved to vote on something that affects them, their families, and their children.
That's democracy.
Anything else is authoritarian dictums, whether they are based on god given or expertise given or gun given power.
So no, that's a non-starter.
Rousseau agrees. I'm glad we've finally reached terminal Enlightenment.
Proof of work, the human version. Like a giant captcha.
So, if you spend enough work on a certain task you prove that you care about the issue at hand, and you can vote.
The major problem of democracy is the preservation of minority rights, and this article takes an enormous amount of time to say that, and to propose a further question (should the minority affected by the decisions of a group have a bigger say than everyone else?) which has been discussed to no consensus since the Greeks.
edit: if there's any answer, it's that a group needs to come up with a set of shared principles/axioms, and develop their decisionmaking process based on those (and how deliberative bodies have justified their processes in the past), rather than trying to cargo-cult some high-level framework built on sand.
The whole reason we're in this situation is because the power asymmetry between property owners and renters seems to be growing at a significant rate. Rapidly rising property values benefit property owners at the expense of the renters and redistributing the rights of a property owner to the community would have massive ramifications for how real estate is valued.
The main hurdle to overcome is finding the politicians you'd need to take power from property owners to give to non-owner residents, and the big problem (at least in the US) is that even at the local level, governments tend to be run by property owners and supported by property-owning donors. Money is fundamental to who gets elected, and as long as this is true, balancing the power disparity and giving real voting power to non-property owners to determine what happens to property will be a massive challenge.
The opposite is true. We need to overturn Euclid and similar rulings that took rights away from individual property owners. Property owners should be allowed to build housing on their own land. There is no legitimate public interest in preventing it (beyond banal, ordinary preferences that are better expressed in a market) and an immense public interest in allowing it.
You get rid of the veto point by restoring property rights, not by further limiting them.
A lot of us homeowners enjoy the things you described here. I want to live in a neighborhood with people who have lived here 5-10+ years. The last thing I want is for my family to be amongst a transient population who have no vested interest in their neighborhood.
Software and digital media more generally really calls into question the notions of property per se.
OP's policy proposal: "for a development worth doing, it should be possible to pay off most of the people who object and still make the development worthwhile."
OP recognizes that some people will pretend that their losses are very large even when they are quite small. "But if we could clearly and strictly demarcate the “true losers” from a project, and allow them to retain their veto, we would perhaps be on the way to making this intractable problem tractable "
They don't really have a clear idea on how to correctly identify the "true losers". In fact, I would argue that identifying true losers is where the intractability of the larger problem emerges from.
It feels intrinsically pretty cheems to just say "this sounds tricky so we shouldn't bother" when the existing system is completely dysfunctional
This is a political problem, so it recurses quite a lot. Whatever set of heuristics you come up with, someone will object to them because they will be losers if we use those heuristics. Then someone will object to the composition of the committee that generated the heuristics. Then someone will object to the system that system that came up with the committee....
Of course, we should try to figure out solutions. But these are "wicked problem" [1]. Solutions are not easy to come by, and there will always be objectors. You can't turn this into a well-defined technical problem with a well-formed solution.
If some working class knob will lose his home, then it's often enough to just offer him twice as much as the home is worth (maybe with helping him find another equivalent home). Such a person knows that it's a good deal, and they end up better off for it. Any perceived reluctance is often just a negotiating tactic, and can be quickly resolved by making the bargain sweeter.
But if Sterling Fitzbillionaire has a mansion with the most beautiful and exclusive view of the shoreline has to put up with an offshore windmill... there's literally no amount of money that makes up for him losing this. You could offer him $10 trillion, and the money is worthless because the mansion with that view is rare enough (or even unique) that money can't buy him another one like it with an unspoiled view. You've reached the fungibility limits of money/property.
Say whatever you want about greed or spitefulness, there is a much more fundamental issue going on here, and it doesn't seem very tractable. It's only aggravated by the plain fact that such people are often in much more influential positions, if not in political offices outright.
The best I can come up with is by disallowing the vetoes entirely, unless they are accompanied by some counter-offer that outlines what would be required for them to withdraw it. Wouldn't matter so much whether the terms were absurd (or seemingly impossible), by forcing them to draft those, it might shift their mindset enough that negotiations (however troubled) could commence. I'm not certain this works, you'd have to run the experiment. I think it might solve some minor fraction of these issues, maybe that improvement's better than nothing.
If you have suggestions for improvement, raise them, or critiques that need a response, raise them.
My suggestion would be to combine this approach with quadratic voting. Then there's no need to decide who does or doesn't get to vote on a development proposal. People who care about it will use their votes on that. Those who don't will use their votes elsewhere. Because votes are finite, people have to prioritize.
The majority of the UK is owned by very few people.
Cite: "Who Owns Britain" by Brian Cahill.
This ownership has not been transparent. Nor do they pay their share of taxes; rather they receive an outside amount of subsidies.
The first step to fixing UK's vetocracy by fixing UK's gini coefficient.
I'm sure Thomas Piketty would say much the same, but I haven't read his books yet (just reviews and interviews).
Of course, the plantation class will continue to wage class war to prevent any reasonable reforms.
Democracy will be captured and corrupted like it already has, by an oligarchic elite. It happened to the Greeks, it happened to the Romans and it's happened to us.
And now we have such hypnotic tools like mass/social media that mass delusion can be instilled at the drop of a proverbial hat. And no, Science wont save you as it can be bought too. Even tobacco and sugar companies were able to deny the obvious by purchasing a few scientists of fortune.
For a time, but then the science won out. First culturally then legally for tobacco. Now sugar industry is loosing culturally and more realize the effects of overconsumption.
Science is a methodology nothing more. The problem is any appeal to human authority, it was quite easy to keep smoking and say "but the science says so...".
What we need are policies to make sure jobs don't flee from into several monstrously oversized cities.
Sidenote, the industrial collapse of 90-s and 2000-s was the reason a lot of US states veered hard-right.
Seems like the reason people in the US don't build houses in the empty patches in the US is because the economics of agglomeration mean much greater efficiency/economic growth when you build them in existing large cities. How do you fight this without making the country much less economically dynamic?
Limit the amount of office space density (cap&trade style, or with a direct tax). Promote decentralization via tax credits, etc.
These are all old ideas, but these days they can be turbo-charged by promoting WFH.
> Seems like the reason people in the US don't build houses in the empty patches in the US is because the economics of agglomeration mean much greater efficiency/economic growth when you build them in existing large cities.
Yes. It's more efficient to open an office in a large city, where you have access to a larger talent pool. And in turn, it's more advantageous to live near a dense city core, as it provides you with more options for employment.
This leads to a never-ending densification and price growth spiral. Manhattan is a good example of the end-game of this kind of death spiral.
And these are exactly the same kinds of market forces that forced companies to dump toxic waste into rivers. After all, if you take care to clean up your toxic waste, then your products will be more expensive and less competitive.
For example let's look at Japan. Japan does not have what you dubbed a densification and price growth spiral despite having cities far more dense than any city in the US. This should tell you that your initial problem is the wrong problem.
The answer is that they develop high-speed transportation to and from dense cores in addition to smaller sparser towns. This means property value is far lower because distance doesn't matter and in fact housing value inverts where it purely depreciates.
If we did what you propose, you would see what's happening to cities like Austin. Where offices are built in a purely sprawling fashion, highly dense traffic and shifting property value to areas along traffic corridors.
Nope. I'm looking at the root cause here.
> For example let's look at Japan. Japan does not have what you dubbed a densification and price growth spiral
Fucking what?!? Tokyo is the example of shitty densificaiton.
Young people in Japan are forced to live in tiny apartments where you can literally sit on a toilet while cooking food: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/business/tiny-apartments-...
All while at the same time having millions of beautiful empty houses readily available: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/realestate/japan-empty-ho...
And they managed to screw themselves up while having a _declining_ population.
> If we did what you propose, you would see what's happening to cities like Austin. Where offices are built in a purely sprawling fashion, highly dense traffic and shifting property value to areas along traffic corridors.
And this is great! Houston is giant, but it's extremely efficient because it doesn't have The Downtown where you _have_ to be. As a result, industry and offices tend to be interspersed with residential areas. So the average commute stays short.
This isn't the gotcha you think it is. It's an entirely separate cultural issue. If you had read the article in question you posted, it mentions the fact that there are multiple cheaper apartments nearby that aren't as trendy due to age. And that these microapartments are explicitly chosen for the sake of living near ultra-trendy areas, though it's not necessary due to the convenience and wide reaching networks of transportation.
> All while at the same time having millions of beautiful empty houses readily available: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/realestate/japan-empty-ho...
Again, read the articles you post. These sit empty due to cultural issues. This is because houses depreciate in value and buying older homes is not viewed as a good thing.
"Houses in Japan typically decrease in value over time until they are worthless — the cultural legacy of post-World War II construction and shifting building codes — with only the land retaining value. Owners feel little incentive to maintain an aging house, and buyers often seek to demolish them and start fresh. But that can be expensive."
> And this is great! Houston is giant, but it's extremely efficient because it doesn't have The Downtown where you _have_ to be. As a result, industry and offices tend to be interspersed with residential areas. So the average commute stays short.
Efficient? Have you lived in Houston or Austin? Because I did. For 5 years. It was a nightmare getting to anywhere because it's a sea of paved-over bullshit with zero avenues to get anywhere outside of using a car. And if you do use a car, you have to wade through awful traffic and a city that isn't design to accommodate people. Houston literally ranks among the worst cities for traffic. Calling Houston efficient is so downright divorced from reality that I would have to question if you've looked at any cities outside of the US. Let alone lived in the cities you extol the virtues of.
Well, yeah. It's called: shitty densification.
> If you had read the article in question you posted, it mentions the fact that there are multiple cheaper apartments nearby that aren't as trendy due to age.
In other words: they are even shittier.
> "Houses in Japan typically decrease in value over time until they are worthless — the cultural legacy of post-World War II construction and shifting building codes — with only the land retaining value. Owners feel little incentive to maintain an aging house, and buyers often seek to demolish them and start fresh. But that can be expensive."
Again, you're looking at symptoms. Tokyo is basically being rebuilt all the time, mostly as a result of corrupt wheeling-and-dealing by real estate developers. But the countryside and smaller cities stay empty and decaying.
> Efficient? Have you lived in Houston or Austin?
Yes, I have. I hated the climate and the (lack of) nature around it, but loved the city.
And yes, Houston is much more efficient than a similarly sized NYC in pretty much all categories: commute time, cost of housing, income inequality (0.48 GINI index vs 0.56 for NYC), infrastructure spending per capita, number of municipal employees per capita, etc.
> Because I did. For 5 years. It was a nightmare getting to anywhere because it's a sea of paved-over bullshit with zero avenues to get anywhere outside of using a car.
And why is that bad? Cars enable more efficient cities. They are objectively far superior to transit for several fundamental reasons.
Then we're done here I guess. You live in an entirely different reality that just isn't true. There's no point to continuing this argument.
Cars provide faster commutes than transit. Always have, always will, except for very narrow exceptions.
Cars provide far more access to people, making them more likely to succeed: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-021-00020-2
Heck, EVs even have a smaller carbon footprint than most transit! See: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
1 is opposition to large scale government projects, for example demolishing existing houses to build infrastructure.
2 is opposition to smaller development, for example building something in a lot you own.
1 should be under scrutiny, especially given governments history of screwing over their minority citizens.
2 should be completely outlawed. I believe we need a "mind you own business" approach to development. No, a developer doesn't need to ask the local community before building something (that complies with zoning) in a lot they own.
Currently most Western democracies are designed to protect minority rights against the majority because of this. In fact, the Bill or Rights in the US can be seen as a great example of this: it prevents the current majority from removing rights deemed essential.
If you look at states that have weak individual property rights (all the communist states, most of the Iberian colonies) you can see the issue: weak property rights by individuals go hand in hand with authoritarianism.
Those who want "change" always want to destroy the system. Historically speaking, that has led to disasters of one sort of another.
It's easy to pretend the bug is actually an important and noble feature, but sometimes it's just a bug that needs fixing.
Mob rule is always a risk but it's often better than rule by an out-of-touch elite.
An aristocratic monarchy is preferable to an oligarchical “democracy” like we have today.
"Aberfeldy Village" is apparently a poor area, and so the ruling class just kind-of exasperatedly assumes that they can run roughshod, and I find it pleasant that it's not the case. Why don't the rich fucks knock over their own houses if that's such a wonderful thing?
(without killing or drugging the unhappies)
I can see the objection.
Yes, there has to be an increase in the absolute numbers. It may be acceptable to compromise on the composition of the community to get those numbers. On the other hand, ignoring the percentages altogether will produce a change in dynamics that will ultimately be detrimental to those in need of social housing.