Argument from Efficacy

I’ve noticed a trend in political discourse over the last, say, 15 years. The tendency is to frame every proposition in terms of what I’m calling the Argument from Efficacy. No one seems to refer to first principles, or any principles at all, anymore. Things are always “if we do x then y will happen,” or “my opponent says y but what will really happen is z so we need to do v to get y.” While I’m all for planning by consequence, things seem to have devolved into a twisted mutant hybrid of economic modeling and Bethamite moral calculus. The thing that made Reagan such an effective figure was saying “I propose to do this because it is the right thing,” rather than “I have a plan that will produce x and y.” Arguments from rules-of-thumb, or maybe something like Mill’s rule-based utilitarianism, are both easier to communicate and easier to remember. Also, while it seems intuitive that greater specificity goes along with greater candor, it’s worth remembering: In the lives of a great many people, the first thing someone trying to take advantage of them does is to give them lots and lots of complicated data.

While seeming to grow throughout the system, the national Democratic Party seems to have the largest problem with this idea. They seem to be the fondest of saying “my scheme will produce this result for these 27 reasons,” and thus making themselves appear both confusing and not to be trusted. Of course, a debate with real clash is difficult with anyone using an argument from efficacy. Things tend to degenerate into “yes it will” and “no it won’t” attempts to predict the future, which is off-putting to the entire electorate. It also makes a meaningful vote hard to register. It is any surprise that the 2000 presidential election produced almost the same results as flipping a coin?

The whole representative thing would probably function a lot better if the discussions centered on value comparisons, and more of a first-principles idea of should and should not, rather than trying to juggle complex inputs and outputs for economic engineering. An over-simplification? Probably, but in a two-party (or even four-party) system, is there really a better way?

-Publius

Not Going to Happen

The pipe dream of the Gulf Coast.

There have been dozens of ideas, programs, promises, and claims about the glorious rebirth of both New Orleans and the Mississippi gulf coast. The most exciting of these is the Congress for New Urbanism’s detailed master plans for several towns in Mississippi, while the most famous is probably credit-card George’s promise to make everything as good as new in the Big Easy. None of this is going to happen. It’s not some conspiracy, it’s just the impersonal forces in play.

Cities (and towns) are built by economies, and the gulf hasn’t had a healthy one in some time. It’s worth remembering that the most iconic parts of the gulf were built up when the river-borne economy was massively more important (and profitable) than it is today. Not only did much of this area have a high poverty rate (implying a lack of productive employment) already, but its economy was disproportionately invested in businesses that were located there because they were forbidden elsewhere. It’s never a good sign when someone locates a firm there because it’s the only place that they can. The nostalgia of the walkable small town (however much I personally might like it) is difficult to execute in San Diego or San Jose, where there’s no shortage of affluent lifestyle-seekers; in a town of casino employees, the premium of making a place pleasant rather that minimally functional represents an even greater share of income than the better-off denizens of a Seaside or a Celebration (Florida) pay now. Good towns are expensive towns. Expensive towns take high incomes.

Another concept to keep in mind is the insurance difference between value (I think that’s the term) and replacement cost. Much of the destroyed area that made the region architecturally distinctive was the eighteenth and nineteenth century indigenous building built up over the passage of time. The components of this wonderful building were natural materials worked by skilled artisans. In the here and now, both natural materials (do you have rail-and-panel anything where you live?) and skilled labor have become (in a relative sense) far and away more expensive. We’re talking about custom-fabrication here. Even if the resources were there to replicate it, is it realistic to expect families below the median income to allocate their funds that way, especially when so many of them have had their very subsistence thrown into questions? Even if the displaced were willing to approve the bill, can a regulator or insurer really approve a transaction paying out several times what the existing property was worth? Even in good condition, an 100-year old house isn’t worth a fraction as much as a new one, for resale reasons alone. Imagine the headlines now: FEMA pays for $30,000 kitchen while children starve in the street.

I’m all for livable, coherent, high-quality community. It’s just not going to happen.

Remembrance of Things Past

I just finished How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, an expose of urban poverty in New York written in 1890, and it fits nicely between two ideas. The first is the over-romanticization of the industrial city and the second is the plight of the garment worker. For Riis, the suburbs can’t be built fast enough. He, with the same kind of logic pursued by the fathers of twentieth-century urban renewal that good buildings make for good neighborhoods, lays the squalid depravation of the immigrant slums of fin-de-siecle Manhattan squarely at the doorstep of their tenement housing. The overcrowding and lack of light and air are to him the source of a myriad of ills, soon remedied by introducing laws to reduce density (no buildings covering more than 85% of their lots) and include greenery. “Life on the street” is for him the absolutely last thing one wants, as his world is full of filth, gangs, needled beer, and the corrupting influence of living with too many others. What would he have thought of the twentieth-century?

The other thought that springs to mind is “has Naomi Klein read this?” [see Organized Labor below] His detailed description of the race-to-the bottom labor practices of the garment industry in the big apple reads alarmingly like the advocacy of today. From Bohemian cigar-rollers exploited by their lack of access to the larger market, to the sliver-thin margins of Jewish cottage sewing in the Lower East Side, the same pattern of wage destruction from a vulnerable population willing to work for starvation rates plays out like a script for the modern Far East. The only thing more tragic than the exploitation of an inefficiently captive labor market is the knowledge that the whole system wouldn’t have worked if these people hadn’t been led to the yoke by their fellow countrymen. One really has to respect the strategy of the Jewish thrift – they seem to have been the only ones to have figured how to climb out of the system over the long term.

My question is: what changed? Obviously wages eventually went up, and these people integrated into the economy. Just as much the cities got healthier and sturdier, and eventually almost withered away entirely. The process of how may hold the lessons to learn. Mass innovation of electricity (often overlooked in urban discussions) doubtless helped a great deal, along with the (much-maligned) automobile later in the story. Is public education the secret to the integration question, or is it the draconian immigration restrictions levied soon thereafter? How does the circumstance differ when it’s the industry that’s the immigrant and the laborer the native? One of the characteristics of the City Beautiful movement that followed Riis was the active private charity – could that be the missing lynchpin?

History only asks that we ask the right questions.