Another newly relevant repost -- Hipster Eugenics

[Apologies for going into reruns so heavy this week, but it's another topic people need to be paying attention to this week.]

Concern over the white right people not having enough babies has become one of the main issues bringing together the Silicon Valley Billionaire wing and the redneck wing of the Republican Party together.

AOC bringing out the deep cuts. https://t.co/mLOCJNhVhj pic.twitter.com/idcRa904j2

— Ben Panko (@btpanko) July 15, 2024

Gov Kristi Noem of South Dakota talking about fertility rates. So much of the Republican Party is the cult of reproduction right now. The JD Vance pick, Elon Musk’s support, anti-lgbtq activism, anti-abortion rights, this speech… all talking about fertility and birth rates. pic.twitter.com/Z8gl6inS3U

— Erin Reed (@ErinInTheMorn) July 16, 2024

Monday, November 21, 2022

Back on the Ithuvania beat -- "Hipster Eugenics"

 

 

 Just to review...

Sometimes, when I come across yet another bit of jaw-dropping flakiness from some tech-bubble billionaire, my thoughts turn to Ithuvania. What if this were an experiment? What if some well-funded research organization decided to see what would happen if it randomly selected individuals of average intelligence, handed them huge checks and told them they were super-geniuses?

I'm not saying that's what happened; I'm just saying the results would have been awfully damned similar.

In his review of the remake of Death Wish, Bob Chipman was talking about the premise of the new version when he stopped and looked around the said, "Y'know, I don't hear anything, but my dog is going nuts."

 If you listen to this article by Julia Black, I'm pretty sure you'll get the same reaction. [emphasis and commentary added]

Malcolm, 36, and his wife, Simone, 35, are "pronatalists," part of a quiet but growing movement taking hold in wealthy tech and venture-capitalist circles. People like the Collinses fear that falling birth rates in certain developed countries like the United States and most of Europe will lead to the extinction of cultures, the breakdown of economies, and, ultimately, the collapse of civilization. [As has been pointed out numerous times (including this post by Joseph), these nations maintain a growing population though immigration which suggests that these particular pro-natalists have less of an issue with birth rates and more of an issue with which people are being born -- MP] It's a theory that Elon Musk has championed on his Twitter feed, that Ross Douthat has defended in The New York Times' opinion pages, and that Joe Rogan and the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen [the honorary dean of Ithuvania -- MP] bantered about on "The Joe Rogan Experience." It's also, alarmingly, been used by some to justify white supremacy around the world, from the tiki-torch-carrying marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting "You will not replace us" to the mosque shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, who opened his 2019 manifesto: "It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates."

Google searches for "population collapse" spiked this summer, after Musk continued to raise the issue in response to Insider's report that he'd fathered twins with one of his employees. According to the United Nations, more than a quarter of the world's countries now have pronatalist policies, including infertility-treatment benefits and "baby bonus" cash incentives. Meanwhile, a spate of new assisted reproductive technology startups are attracting big-name investors such as Peter Thiel and Steve Jurvetson [Another charmer -- MP], fueling a global fertility-services market that Research and Markets projects will reach $78.2 billion by 2025.

...

Together [the Collinses] write books and work in the VC and private-equity worlds. Simone has previously served as managing director for Dialog, the secretive retreat cofounded by Thiel. While they relate to the anti-institutional wing of the Republican Party, they're wary of affiliating with what they called the "crazy conservatives."  Above all, they are focused on branding pronatalism as hip, socially acceptable, and welcoming [It's the 'welcoming' that makes it truly special -- MP]— especially to certain people. Last year, they cofounded the nonprofit initiative Pronatalist.org.

...

"We're frustrated that one of the inherent points of this culture is that people are super private within it," Simone said. They not only hope that their transparency will encourage other members of the upper class to have more children; they want to build a culture and economy around the high-birth-rate lifestyle.

The payoff won't be immediate, Simone said, but she believes if that small circle puts the right plans into place, their successors will "become the new dominant leading classes in the world." [Boy, that has a familiar ring to it -- MP]

...

It makes sense considering that Musk, who has fathered 10 known children with three women, is the tech world's highest-profile pronatalist, albeit unofficially. He has been open about his obsession with Genghis Khan, the 13th-century Mongol ruler whose DNA can still be traced to a significant portion of the human population. One person who has worked directly with Musk and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for this article recalled Musk expressing his interest as early as 2005 in "populating the world with his offspring."

...

These worries tend to focus on one class of people in particular, which pronatalists use various euphemisms to express. In August, Elon's father, Errol Musk, told me that he was worried about low birth rates in what he called "productive nations." The Collinses call it "cosmopolitan society." Elon Musk himself has tweeted about the movie "Idiocracy," in which the intelligent elite stop procreating, allowing the unintelligent to populate the earth.

...

The Collinses themselves have been called "hipster eugenicists" online, something Simone called "amazing" when I brought it to her attention.

Malcolm's "going to want to make business cards that say 'Simone and Malcolm Collins: Hipster Eugenicists," she said with a laugh.

 

Two years ago at the blog -- didn't expect to be reposting this one quite so soon

Back in 2021, the national press was desperately trying to convince itself that Trump was losing his hold on the Republican Party. This was behind the wishful analytics that launched a thousand "DeSantis is Dominating a Sinking Trump" stories. It was also why journalists and pundits were so eager to believe the obvious con job that was J.D. Vance.

Friday, August 12, 2022

J.D. Vance: David Brooks doing Hee-Haw cosplay

Before we get to Vance, here's a bit of relevant personal history. My grandparents on my father's side had a family farm in the Rio Grande Valley. On my mother's side, my grandparents started out as sharecroppers until World War II gave my grandfather the opportunity to find work as a carpenter. 

I was born in Texas, but when I was five, my family moved to a small town in the Ozarks and I stayed in the region until I was in my thirties. I taught high school and college there before making the jump to the corporate world and the East Coast before ending up in California. 

I mention this to give you some idea why the transparent fraud of J.D. Vance pissed me off so much, and why I'm so angry with the national press and particularly (as always) the NYT for their role in the sham.

 

 2022 has been a rough year for conventional wisdom which means a rough year for the NYT and journalists like Weisman. Not only was his framing inappropriate; it was wildly off base. Vance has taken what was supposed to be a safe seat and made it into a tight (an for the GOP, expensive) race.

But it's not just Vance's competence as a candidate that the press got wrong; it was his sham persona, and no publication bought into the lie more than the New York Times.

Take a look at Jennifer Senior's 2016 review of Hillbilly Elegy.

But his profile is misleading. His people — hillbillies, rednecks, white trash, choose your epithet (or term of affection, depending on your point of view)  [These terms are in no way interchangeable -- MP] — didn’t step off the Mayflower and become part of America’s ascendant class. “Poverty is the family tradition,” he writes. His ancestors and kin were sharecroppers, coal miners, machinists, millworkers — all low-paying, body-wearying occupations that over the years have vanished or offered diminished security.

We start hitting likely embellishments right off the bat. The part of Kentucky Vance's grandparents came from does not and probably did not produce the kinds of cash crops associated with sharecropping. It's possible that Vance's family moved there from more productive land, or it might be he was just adding a flourish to his tale of humble origins. 

Mr. Vance was raised in Middletown, Ohio, a now-decaying steel town filled with Kentucky transplants, which at one point included his Mamaw and Papaw — in newscaster English, that’s grandma and grandpa — who moved there shortly after World War II. Though the couple eventually managed to achieve the material comforts of a middle-class life (house, car), they brought their Appalachian values and habits with them. Some were wonderfully positive, like loyalty and love of country. But others, like a tendency toward violence and verbal abuse, were inimical to family life.

Just to emphasize this point, J.D. Vance was born in the suburbs and never lived in rural America (no, summer vacations don't count). His mother was born in those same suburbs. Middletown is a lower middle-class suburb located between Cincinnati and Dayton. While hardly prosperous, it is better off than some of the surrounding area, For instance, the percent of the population below the poverty line in 2020 (back when Vance was living there) was around 9%, roughly half that of nearby Dayton.

As for violence being inimical to family life, Vance is on the record as saying women should stay with abusive husbands for the sake of the children, so maybe that's more his thing.
 

Papaw was forever coming home drunk. Mamaw, “a violent nondrunk,” was forever tormenting him, whether by serving him artfully arranged plates of garbage for dinner or dousing him with gasoline. All this guerrilla warfare affected their children. Mr. Vance’s mother was an empress of instability — violent, feckless, prone to hysteria. A long stint in rehab couldn’t shake her addiction to prescription narcotics (she’d later move on to heroin). She spun through more boyfriends than this reader could count and at least five husbands.

The only reason Mr. Vance made it out in one piece is because his grandparents eventually reconciled, becoming his unofficial guardians. (He also spent a terrifically affirming four years in the Marines.) Mamaw was especially encouraging. She was tough as snakeskin, foul-mouthed as a mobster and filled with love. In a town where many children don’t finish high school, she raised a grandson who managed to graduate from Ohio State University and Yale Law School, defying skyscraping odds.

 

Have to stop for just a minute and  say something about those "skyscraping odds." Besides being purple prose, it was also badly inaccurate.

Ohio State is a good school but it is not (to its credit) particularly exclusive with an acceptance rate of 68%. Furthermore, Vance went to OSU by way of the military, meaning he had a tremendous support network to help him get into college.Vance graduated summa cum laude, so he was clearly hard-working and academically talented, but suburban kid raised by his grandparents graduates high school, joins the Marines, gets into a good university, goes on to get an ivy league law degree is not particularly inspiring. 

I've taught high school in the Delta and in Watts and I can point you to lots of kids who genuinely defied the odds to get where they are. Putting Vance in that group is offensive. 

It's also worth noting that Vance got his opportunities primarily through the GI Bill and the land-grant college system, two landmark progressive programs that Vance's mentor, employer, and political backer Peter Thiel would beat to death with a tire iron given the chance.

“Hillbilly Elegy,” in my mind, divides into two components: the family stories Mr. Vance tells — most of which are no doubt better experienced on the page than they were in real life — and the questions he raises. Chief among them: How much should he hold his hillbilly kin responsible for their own misfortunes? 

...

Time and again, Mr. Vance preaches a message of tough love and personal responsibility. He has no patience with an old acquaintance who told him he quit his job because he hated waking up early, only to take to Facebook to blame the “Obama economy.” Or with a former co-worker at a tile warehouse who missed work once a week though his girlfriend was pregnant.

Just to recap. Vance is a Thiel disciple with a history of romanticizing and possibly embellishing his stories. Perhaps we should take that into account when reading his unlikely sounding anecdotes.

Squint, and you’ll note the incendiary nature of Mr. Vance’s argument. It’s always treacherous business to blame a group for its own misfortunes. Certainly, an outsider cannot say what Mr. Vance is saying to his kin and kind. But he can — just as President Obama can say to fellow African-Americans, “brothers should pull up their pants,” as he did on MTV.

 Except that Obama is an African-American while Vance is a venture capitalist from the suburbs doing hillbilly cosplay.

None of it mattered, not the sham persona, not the embellished bio, not the association with and dependency on a far-right billionaire so extreme he publicly called women's suffrage a bad idea. Journalists across the country immediately fell in love.

David Brooks got where he is by telling often fabricated anecdotes with a veneer of pop sociology that confirmed his target audience's preconceptions about the class system. Vance took the act to the next level, adding "first-hand" observations and substituting tough love for Brook's "more to be pitied than censured" shtick when discussing the lower classes. Vance also seemed to offer special insight into the rise of Trump, something that had caught the pundit class completely off guard.

 The mainstream press swallowed the obvious fraud because they wanted to believe it.

I feel bad about associating Hee Haw with Vance, so I picked out a few clips to balance things out.

 

 

[I did have three, but YouTube didn't like the third one. -- MP]

Predictive Models and Black Swans

 Every predictive model relies on at least one of two things. The first is the assumption that patterns and relationships will in the future look basically like they did in the past. The second is first principles, the idea that we have such a trustworthy and complete understanding of how things work that we can say with a high level of confidence that this system or set of conditions will produce this result.

Pretty much the first thing they tell you in any introductory class on regression is the all of the beautiful and deeply reassuring math around confidence about your work assumes that you only draw conclusions about the population your data comes from. When you wander out of the range of observed data, you leave behind that rigorously proven framework.

This is always a problem with predictive models because obviously the future is outside of the range of observed data. We can get around this to a degree by not straying too far, by relying on patterns and relationships that have proven stable over time, and by keeping an eye on things that might cause our models to go haywire. You're still breaking the rules, but you're not getting too far out on the ice.

Models of presidential elections have always been weakly supported both in terms of data and our understanding of the underlying mechanisms that drive them. In terms of predictive value, political data always has a sell by date. Just because a particular group reliably voted one way 50 years ago doesn't mean that you can count on them to do the same thing today likewise, polling and elections have changed so much that it makes no sense to aggregate numbers that aren't relatively recent. Take away special cases in outliers, and you can easily find yourself building models on n < 10.

In the 21st century, things have gotten even worse for political scientists. Old relationships are broken down, polling faces serious issues, and pretty much all the elections are outliers on one dimension or another.

Now add in black swans. These events are more or less by definition outside of the range of observed data. You can make math-based statements about their possible aftermath, but I wouldn't say they were based on the discipline of statistics. All you can do under the circumstances is make the most informed guess you can then run the numbers to see what you get.

I won't go so far as to say one guess is as good as another, just that you shouldn't rely too heavily on guesses period.

This isn't the video where she calls Steven Pinker a dick, but you can't have everything

Finally got around to watching this video by physics post-doc Angela Collier, recommended by frequent commenter David, and I'm giving it a strong recommendation as well, albeit with a caveat or two. It is (as mentioned in David's comment) too long, partly because it could do with some editing, but mainly because it consists of two halves which, though related, might work better as two freestanding videos, both of which would be very good.

The first part is a discussion of what makes a cranck, why otherwise smart and accomplished people can be sucked down the rabbit hole by obsessing over fringe ideas. Collier also talks about how others can do something similar and yet maintain their equilibrium. Her example of the first is Francis G. Perey and his belief that he had disproven Bell's theorem. Her example of the second is Luis Walter Alvarez, who investigated such kook-friendly topics as the JFK assassination, pyramids, and dinosaurs, but rather than damaging his reputation, greatly enhanced it (especially with that last category).

The second part takes a deep dive into the self immolation of Harvard's Avi Loeb, who as regular readers already know, has gone from being one of the world's leading astrophysicists to a crank who sees proof of alien technology pretty much everywhere. Loeb has been a major player in our UFO thread. This video fills in the some missing and particularly damning details.

Collier as posted a number of videos on physics and science journalism. From what I've sampled they're all worthwhile (though, as previously mentioned, a good editor wouldn't hurt).

harvard & aliens & crackpots: a disambiguation of Avi Loeb 

YIMBY and the education reform movement -- part one: questions of class and technocracy

I've been thinking about the similarities between the education reform movement we spent so much time discussing a dozen years ago and the YIMBY movement we've been focusing on for the past few years. I had originally intended on doing a medium length post on the subject, but the more I think about it the more I realize it's going to take more than one trip.

It would be an oversimplification to say that the education reform movement was a bunch of management consultants and rich white and Asian people swooping in to show poor black and Hispanic people how things were done, but that would capture a great deal of what was going on back during the height of the movement. This was nowhere more obvious than with Teach for America, a tiny but wildly overhyped program that took kids from elite colleges, gave them a crash course in teacher prep, then dumped them in the classroom with highly mixed results.

The hagiographic coverage that TFA teachers got at a time when career educators in genuinely tough urban and rural schools were being routinely demonized was more than a little contradictory, but it made perfect sense when you remembered two things. First, around the turn of the millennium, the education reform movement's worldview was the standard narrative, so widely and unquestioningly accepted by the press that editors who would reflexively both-sides even the clearest of issues would give reform advocates a free pass to say anything they wanted unchallenged. Second, the upper echelons of journalism are disproportionately made up of the children of elite families. It's not that surprising that alumni of Ivy League universities will be more impressed by a rich kid who chooses to do a two year stint teaching in Inglewood than they are by poor kids who go to state schools then choose to devote their lives teaching their communities. It's sad, but it's not surprising.

Class and economic status play a different role in the YIMBY movement, but not that different. In both cases, the world is viewed predominantly through a six or seven figure lens. Much of the NIMBY/YIMBY debate comes down to old money versus nouveau riche, the "we were here first crowd" versus the "we've got the money why can't we live by the beach?" crowd.

In terms of coverage and rhetoric, the focus of the housing discourse is completely dominated by a handful of enclaves for the rich. The plurality of American housing stories are about a wealthy, medium-sized (17th largest by population) urban exurb that is unique to the point of being an outlier along so many dimensions that many researchers avoid using it as an example. Here in Southern California you are more likely to find a discussion of the tiny postage stamps of Santa Monica and Venice than about all of East LA. Even the housing crisis of the Central Valley was largely ignored until someone came up with the bright idea of pushing the narrative that the explosion in prices was caused by rich tech bros moving to Bakersfield. (Quick side note. This is and always has been bullshit. Bakersfield is not a town that is going to attract the wealthy and trendy, particularly not in a time of global warming. I'd argue that they don't know what they're missing. Like the late Jonathan Gold, I'm very fond of the town, but even I wouldn't want to spend August there.)

Not only are poor and lower middle class people underrepresented in the YIMBY movement, there is considerable tension between the movement and those housing advocates who primarily come from and speak for people below the median income line. There are sharp divides over issues such as rent control, public housing, vacancy rates, and the trustworthiness of developers. I'm not going to get into who's right and who's wrong on each of these issues (though, for the record, I tend to favor the YIMBY positions within reason). The point is that the movement's perspective is one of successful people, economists, and developers. There's nothing wrong with that perspective, but they don't speak for everyone.

This isn't a post about politics; it's a post about the poitical press.

Even more than usual, the best political commentary over the past few days has been coming from Josh Marshall. Though I want to wait until the dust settles before weighing in on the politics and political journalism of the moment (taking a pause in times of confusion is a good policy in general), I did want to break into our regularly scheduled programming to highlight a few recent observations from Marshall.

[Emphasis added.]

 One of the reasons for that shift was simply that Biden was still there. He’s still running and still the nominee. We’re in the midst of a level of feeding frenzy I’ve only seen twice as a political observer — the first week of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in 1998 and the one that ended Al Franken’s career in the Senate in 2018. The Washington press corps and national political press overwhelmingly and vociferously want to force Biden out of the race. I don’t say that in the sense of bias, per se — it’s not even necessarily at the level of intentionality. It’s more at the level of crowd behavior. It’s just how these feeding frenzies work. What do foxes think they’re doing when they rip through a hen house? For the DC press, this is all mixed in with ego and a sense of vindication. But again, it’s just how feeding frenzies work. But at a certain point, the feeding frenzy has been churning for days and Biden’s still running and there’s some element of a wave cresting. Like, hey we’ve been telling you all the reasons why Biden has to withdraw from the race for days but he’s still running and okay, well, maybe not — or, like, we can’t keep up this 100 yard dash forever. It’s just a cresting pattern.

At the same time I think there were the first hints of a realization that this has been overwhelmingly a conversation among media and political elites without much focus or knowledge about anything average voters are thinking or doing. My point here isn’t that average voters are necessarily rising up in defense of Joe Biden. More that no one really has any idea what most voters are thinking. And of course there is no “average voter.” It’s a big country with lots of different kinds of people. My point is simply that the elite conversation had already arrived at a consensus and blown right past it without any real idea of what the rest of the country was thinking.

This was captured for me by a couple interviews with Rep. Debbie Dingell (D) of Michigan. At the beginning of the week she appeared on TV demanding Biden solve the situation or move on, appear on camera with various feats of cognitive strength, etc. We’re running out of time, etc. Then, a couple days later, she described spending time back in her district and getting approached by ordinary voters saying, Debbie, what are you talking about? We had a primary and we voted for Biden. What’s going on here? It wasn’t so much a dead-end defense of Biden as a reality check that what was happening in DC was pretty different from what was happening at home. And, again, not absolute resistance, as she seemed to put it, more just, “hold on a second, what are we talking about here?” After that she’s shifted to a more equivocal stance, mainly saying we need to find a way to get back to bashing Donald Trump.

Before we get down into the weeds, we need to acknowledge maybe the most obvious point: Clinton in '98; Franken in 2018; Biden in 2024. I might need to check Wikipedia to make sure, but I'm reasonably certain all three of those politicians were Democrats. To find a comparable case with Republican, you probably need to go back 50 years to the presidency of Richard Nixon. For a particularly informative point of comparison, this is not the first time we have seen an incumbent president who has battled rumors about age and decline stumble in an initial debate, but this is the first time the New Yorker has responded by suggesting we consider the 25th amendment. [Emphasis added.]

Despite trailing far behind Reagan in the polls leading up to the debate, Mondale exceeded expectations and emerged as the clear winner of the first debate. According to a Newsweek/Gallup poll, 54 percent of debate-watchers favored Mondale, while only 35 percent sided with Reagan. President Reagan was perceived as confused and tired during the debate, whereas Mondale demonstrated articulate communication. This praised performance briefly revitalized the Mondale campaign, narrowing Reagan's lead in the polls by seven points.

This is not to suggest that the establishment press is biased against Democrats, at least not in the conventional sense, but that's the way it plays out in practice. Decades of working the ref now totally internalized. A profoundly flawed of journalistic ethics. Republican skill at messaging and setting the agenda. Probably most of all a herd mentality so powerful that lockstep is almost unavoidable while independent thought is vanishingly rare.

The use of the terms 'ego' and 'vindication' are extraordinarily insightful on Marshall's part. If you go back through the interviews and memoirs of editors and publisher of the New York Times (which generally speaks for the establishment press), you will see a great deal of regret over coming off badly, over being wrong, but virtually no regret over decisions like teaming with Steve Bannon or giving heavy coverage to leaks which everyone in the newsroom knew were part of a Kremlin operation to influence the election.

We know this about the NYT newsroom because one reporter, Amy Chozick , has stepped up and acknowledged her role in the election of Trump. As far as I know, no editor with the paper has done the same.

It is difficult to overstate how humiliating the past decade has been for the establishment press going all the way back to 2015 when the standard narrative was that Donald Trump could never get the Republican nomination. Since then, the narrative has been that there was no way for Trump to beat DeSantis, Dobbs would not be a big deal in the upcoming elections, inflation and Biden's unpopularity would devastate the Democrats in the midterm, Gaza would continue to grow as a political issue, "sure, abortion was a big deal in the midterms, the people are starting to forget about it," Biden would never catch up with Trump in the polls.

(I was tempted to mention how the New York Times called the Russian military lean and lethal at the beginning of the Ukraine war, but you know me, I hate to pile up on.)

The establishment press and most of all the New York Times hates to be embarrassed. I'm not talking about normal levels of aversion. I mean they genuinely hate it. The idea that this is the best paper in the nation is fundamental to its culture and to the sense of identity of many who work there. Self-congratulation has become a verbal tic for these poeple. They don't even hear themselves doing it anymore.

Whenever the press does something that seems to undermine its presumed political leanings, ask yourself "does this make them look good?" Case in point, within days of the decision, the New York Times and Politico jumped on the narrative that Dobbs wouldn't matter and they have been trying to shore it up ever since. Recently, the NYT has been pushing the idea that Donald Trump has successfully pivoted to the center on reproductive rights and have downplayed or failed to mention entirely tons of conflicting evidence such as Trump continuing to brag about overturning Roe V Wade or telling increasingly fantastic stories about infanticide in blue states. The New York Times is clearly a pro-choice paper, but it's safe to say that they care more about not being caught in a mistake than they do about women's lives.

One more point. Politicians and the press corps have always had an insular and incestuous relationship. In the Internet age it has only got worse. This has led not only to a growing disconnect between those in the bubble and those outside of it; it has led to a dunning Kruger effect around that disconnect. They don't know how little they know, which is one of the reasons why their response to the 2016 election was to put pith helmets on their reporters and send them to the diners of middle America.

Back in 1998, just as the feeding frenzy was cresting, you would see journalists and pundits confused, even stunned, at how little the rest of America cared about an extramarital affair. They would shake their heads and ask what were people thinking, not even considering the possibility that it was they and not everyone else who were going crazy.

'This is the year 1980, by now half the population of the United States is living in cities and towns that didn't even exist 20 years ago.'

Lots of threads colliding on this one.

First off, it's a 1961 documentary about what researchers and technocrats thought the future would be like. Postwar beliefs and  attitudes about progress and technology are a long-standing obsession here at the blog. As the title quote indicates, the program captures the era's schizophrenic optimism, the idea that if we could avoid nuclear Armageddon, we'd be unstoppable.

For an added touch of relevance, the show's first half is focused on the founding of Brasília.

Given that establishing new cities (or at least, commissioning CGI renderings of new cities) has recently come back into fashion among plutocrats and dictators, it's useful to see how the real thing was done.

"Big City" (1961)

What do you call a dense, well-planned, innovative exurb? ... An exurb.

However, the East Solano Plan, as proposed, can offer a model for how to build new cities with the whole ecosystem in mind, intentionally: dense housing, paired with walkable and transit-accessible necessities and amenities like jobs, parks, daycares, shops, and services.

— California YIMBY (@cayimby) June 19, 2024

Just to catch everyone up. 

This would be an example of my concerns with naive YIMBYism.

It's almost like reducing sprawl wasn't really the goal

The advocates for this project have gone on at great length about all the great ideas and innovations in this proposal, how walkable and sustainable it will be, how the planners have thought through smart ways to use public spaces and encourage local dining and culture, but before we go down the rabbit hole and pursue the feasibility and impact of each of these ideas, this is a good time to step back and remind ourselves why density is considered a good thing and sprawl bad.

There are a lot of arguments for densification. It decreases the footprint required for housing. It reduces commuting time. It reduces the need for additional roads and other transportation infrastructure. It reduces carbon emissions and other pollution.

While these are all valid, all but the first (and in the West, probably least important) depend on how we define density. If were just talking about having a bunch of people living very close to each other, but still driving considerable distances work, shop, dine, etc., then our densification has accomplished little, and may have actually made things worse.

That last point is not just hypothetical. Though we can go back and forth on the magnitude, we note there are cases of new housing in San Francisco being taken by people who worked and previously lived in Silicon Valley. Assuming they were not fully remote, the result was to increase the time and distance being driven and all the negative externalities that go with that.

Now let's take a look at the Solano County project. We'll need more precise details and in-depth traffic impact studies to be more exact, but we are looking at a site roughly halfway between San Francisco/Oakland and Sacramento, slightly closer to the latter, with commute times ranging from 45 to an hour and 15 minutes. It will probably be forty-five minutes to an hour away from University of California at Davis. About the same to Stockton.

Though San Francisco is somewhat smaller and population than most people seem to think, when combined with Oakland we are still talking about well over a million people. Sacramento is about half that but, being the state capital, it tends to punch above its weight. Stockton has over three hundred thousand. If you were looking to establish an exurb to service all of these areas, this is where you'd put it.

And not to put too fine a point on it, exurbs are bad.

Keep in mind that there will be no passenger rail service to this new town for the foreseeable future and that traveling by bus will inevitably make these commute times longer even assuming excellent service. How likely are people to live here without a car? Remote work complicates the picture a bit but presumably most of the residents will work in either Sacramento, Stockton, or the Bay Area. We can easily be talking about over 150 to 250 miles a week of commuting. What about shopping, dining, entertainment, and other services? Even given the most optimistic estimates, for years to come this will still be a relatively small town that can't hope to compete with the major cities on either side.

No matter how densely packed or efficiently laid out this town is, no matter how well designed and innovative the local transportation system is, any conceivable savings will be dwarfed by the fact that this is an exurb.

On a completely unrelated note:

Other investors include Nat Friedman, a co-founder of California YIMBY and a current board member. Brian Hanlon, who leads the organization, said Friedman had no influence on California YIMBY’s endorsing of the East Solano Plan.

The thought never crossed our minds.

Coffeezilla vs Rabbit

Coffeezilla first got on my radar when the Financial Times quoted his investigation of a shady crypto deal. I've been watching his channel ever since and I can vouch for the guy. If you're looking for good investigative journalism focused on the financial side of crypto, NFTs, and overhyped tech startups, this is an essential stop.

If we're talking about hype in 2024, the letters AI can't be far behind. These two videos pick apart a particularly sketchy company that has $30 million based on an AI breakthrough that appears to be nothing more than "ChatGPT with some hard-coded scripts."

Music for the 4h

 
























Listening to Cohan, it's easy to forget how controversial going to war in Europe was.

And finally, something appropriate from the great Jerry Goldsmith.

Come for the Brian Eno quote, stay for the cultural insights

In addition to the great quote, I'd say this was exceptional work from Bob Chipman but I don't think you can be characteristically exceptional (seems like an oxymoron). He does a great job walking at critical tightrope, maintaining his objectivity while giving an evocative account of his subjective reactions to the film.

Much of the review is devoted to the story behind the movie, a passion project decades in the making that was completed after the creator's death through the hard work of friends and fans. Chipman talks with well-earned nostalgia about stop action animation the film was built around and, based on the clips shown here, the work is excellent. He also places this picture in the larger context of independent filmmaking and be rather uncertain point we find ourselves at.

Highly recommended across the board.

It's almost like reducing sprawl wasn't really the goal

A rational land-use policy in a state like California needs to balance the agricultural productivity against the proximity to housing demand. Though there is still more farming in LA County than you might expect, it's a tiny fraction of what you would've seen just 50 or 60 years ago. It just doesn't make sense to have orange groves in the middle of a major metropolis no matter how productive the are.

There are lots of places in California where the housing crisis could be greatly helped by converting just a few square miles of farmland into residential areas, particularly if the focus were on apartment complexes. Of these, the places where the need is most dire and the opportunity is greatest tend to run along the 99.

Check out Bakersfield, which has recently suffered some of the most explosive growth in home prices in the state despite being surrounded by unoccupied land.

If a little less than 1% of Kern County's farmland was used for housing immediately adjacent to Bakersfield, it would increase the city's residential area by one half. Obviously that would be overkill. 0.5% would be enough to largely alleviate the problem, even less would do if the development focused on medium to large apartment buildings.

Keep in mind, we are talking about developable land that is literally right next to the city. Bus lines would only have to be extended a half dozen miles. Many people could walk or bike to work and even those dependent on cars would only need to be making short drives.

To be clear, I'm not saying that Bakersfield or any of the other towns that are facing rapidly rising home prices along the 99 should start converting farmland into residential spaces -- I have deeply mixed feeling about that approach -- but if we are going to have this conversation, this is where it needs to start.

Where we don't need to be having this conversation is around a car-dependent exurb about an hour from any of the cities it is likely to serve, even an exurb carved out of less productive land. This is why having the actual co-founder of California YIMBY invest in the latter is such an interesting plot twist.

Twelve years ago -- Time to revisit the locavore non-debate

 The mystery of why this attack on the locavore movement was so bad when legitimate criticisms were so easy to come by would have first gotten a little deeper, then gotten simpler if I had googled the author first.

Pierre Desrochers is associated with pretty much every conservative/libertarian think tank you can think of (the Mises Institute, the American Institute for Economic Research, the Fraser Institute, Cato, The American Enterprise Institute) and apparently plugged in to the right's sinecure economy.

There are a lot of good arguments for locavore skepticism, but none of them seem particularly Austrian Schoolish. There's nothing about the locavore movement that is obviously antithetical to conservative/ libertarian philosophy. If anything just the opposite. It does not require increased taxation, subsidies, or regulation. It is based on encouraging consumers to have an impact through personal choices. It encourages entrepreneurship.

But after a few years of dealing with posts from Cafe Hayek and think pieces from Cato, you start to get a feel for the table and you realize that sometimes the objective is not about winning arguments, or changing policy, or even being consistent with conservative/libertarian values; it's about catharsis and dominance.

Desrochers skips over the many valid arguments for not overemphasizing local foods, and instead creates straw-men versions of locavores who demand everyone eat nothing but food produced within a hundred miles because his target audience wants crude caricatures. People on the other side of the argument are...

 

A nuanced, fact-based discussion about sustainability and scalability (like the one Joseph and I are about to have on the topic of veganism) would raise serious questions about the locavore movement, but it wouldn't make those tree-hugging liberals look foolish and it wouldn't make all those George Mason faculty members feel good about themselves.

 

Sunday, July 8, 2012

"Is not" journalism and our excessive tolerance of silliness

On Marketplace yesterday, Pierre Desrochers, author of the Locavore's Dilemma, presented his case against locavores. It did not go well.

There are good arguments against the locavore movement, that it's a distraction, that it isn't scalable, that it's a solution only available to the well-off, that the superiority of local produce is largely due to suggestion, that there's no good business model to support it, that frozen vegetables are actually more nutritious. I don't necessarily agree with all of these, but they're serious arguments that an advocate of the locavore movement have to address.

Desrochers doesn't make any of these arguments, nor will you see him addressing issues like asymmetry of information or monocultures. Instead we get what we so often get from contrarians, shrill and unadulterated silliness. The bar for these "is not" pieces is so embarrassingly low as to barely exclude grunts and spit bubbles. In this case, Desrochers' "arguments"* depend on the following assumptions:


1. Almost everyone will become a locavore;


2. Rather than trying to eat more locally grown food, locavores will eat nothing but local;


3. Even in times of shortage and crop failure, there will be no imports;


4. and despite all of this locavores will continue eating the exact same food in the same seasons.


On top of this, Desrochers doesn't even seem to have kept up with the debate. Consider this:

It's better to grow tomatoes in the Florida sun than in a heated greenhouse in upstate New York because the energy required to transport them 1200 miles is only a fraction of that required to heat greenhouses for several weeks.

Florida tomatoes are literally the worst possible crop  to use as an example here.

In addition to being tasteless, Estabrook also points out that compared to tomatoes from other sources or from a few decades ago, the modern Florida variety have fewer nutrients, more pesticides (particularly compared to those from California), and are picked with what has been described as 'slave labor' (and given the use of shackles this doesn't seem like much of an exaggeration).

Estabrook's book got a tremendous amount of press and it's hard to imagine that anyone who encountered any of that coverage would use Florida tomatoes as an anti-locavore example. By the same token it's hard to imagine that anyone who had been following the discussion of the trend toward fewer varieties of crops with more geographic concentration would use blights and pests to support the status quo as Desrochers does.

I don't want to spend too much time on the locavore debate (if that's what you're looking for, Felix Salmon's a good place to start ). What interests me here is the journalistic phenomena of is-not-ism, We start with a trendy, over-hyped movement. For bonus points, its promoters tend to be self-satisfied, upper class liberals, the kind who annoy even other liberals.

At this point, if you can get someone with reasonable credentials to write an "is not" book taking the opposite position, that's really all that's required. The actual content doesn't matter. Commentators of similar persuasion will promote the book (even those who are smart enough to see through it).. Mainstream media outlets will give the authors airtime in the name of openness and balance.
 

But openness to new ideas is only a virtue if it's accompanied by some sort of critical facility. We need to start recognizing silliness again and, more to the point, we need to start demanding more.

"The Ensh*ttification of Everything"

 

I've never been a big fan of On the Media --they've always struck me as too wimpy for the job at hand -- but I am a big fan of Cory Doctorow and this segment is an excellent introduction to some of his most5 important ideas.

[01:00] Host Brooke Gladstone interviews Cory Doctorow, journalist, activist, and the author of Red Team Blues, on his theory surrounding the slow, steady descent of the internet. 

[15:59] Brooke asks Cory if the troubles that plague some corners of the internet are specific to Big Digital, rather than the economy at large—and how our legal systems enabled it all. Doctorow explains how the antitrust practices of the early 1900s went awry, and what exactly he means by “twiddling.” 

[31:29] Cory and Brooke discuss possible solutions to save the world wide web.  Among them: better enforcement of privacy laws, interoperability, and the ever elusive "right-to-exit." Plus, hear about the one industry that so far has been mostly immune to the forces of "enshittification."

The abortion narrative – – convergence, herd mentality, and the inability to say "oops"

To understand the politics of 2024, you need to understand the political journalism of 2022.

Tom Bonier, the analyst who probably came off the best over the past couple of years, has a highly recommended thread commemorating the anniversary of the Dobbs decision.

On the 2nd anniversary of the Dobbs decision, I figured I'd share a reminder of how abortion rights has become the most powerful single issue in politics, and is likely more salient now than it was in 2022.

— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) June 25, 2024

 [For those who prefer their threads rolled up, here's a link.]

One important aspect which Bonier hits only tangentially is how rapidly the establishment press, particularly the New York Times and Politico, converged on the Dobbs-won't-matter narrative, and how far they have been willing to go to protect it from a growing mountain of conflicting data.

After you've been following the mainstream press for a while, the appeal of the narrative is not difficult to reverse engineer. If you are leery of being seen as a cheerleader for the Democrats, nervous about Republicans working the refs, and generally inclined to picture yourself as sober and above the fray," no big deal" was the obvious choice.

https://x.com/MollyJongFast/statu

 

 

 

 

Some of the sharper and more independent minded observers like Bonier immediately spotted trends in the data that undercut the narrative...

I shared that finding in a tweet and a hastily assembled chart the next day. To be clear, I have never seen a registration surge among any specific group like this before, and don't expect to again. pic.twitter.com/ZO8VV1IfQt

— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) June 25, 2024

But most data journalists were treating the data as a drunkard's lamppost, a source not of illumination but of support for the approved Dobbs narrative and for that of the red wave. 

NYT 2022/10/17

Since the midterms, we've seen a lot of moonwalking and "but next time it'll be different" analyses, often with a data-based veneer (there is an essential distinction between following the data and coming up with an argument that supports your preferred point and doesn't conflict with the data). There has also been an alarming rush to credulously embrace Republican spin about how the election is going. The latest example being that Trump and the GOP have successfully pivoted to the center.

 

 

 NYT columnist and good soldier, Ezra Klein:

I found myself, this week, watching Trump’s May 1 rally in Waukesha, Wis. Most of it features Trump’s constant stream of overstatement, false nostalgia, wild braggadocio and barely veiled threat. But the tenor changed when Trump turned to abortion. Here, Trump swung suddenly to the left of his own base. The goal, he said, was “to get abortion out of the federal government. Everybody wanted that. That was uniform. Then about 10 years ago, people lost their way. They started talking about — how many months?”

This is Trump’s pivot on abortion. Unlike other Republicans [The "other" is doing a bit of heavy lifting here. -- MP], he’s saying the goal wasn’t, and isn’t, a nationwide abortion ban. The goal was letting states decide for themselves, and now they are.

“There are some very conservative states that voted a very much more liberal policy than anybody would’ve thought,” Trump said. “Very liberal policy, a couple of states. I won’t mention, but a couple of states really surprise people. But, basically the states decide on abortion. And people are absolutely thrilled with the way that’s going on.”

Thrilled? The one time you can hear the crowd boo Trump is during his abortion spiel. But he doesn’t back down. I don’t know if Trump’s effort to run to the center on abortion will work, but he’s definitely going to try, even if it offends his base. Is there any issue on which Biden is doing the same? 

With the possible exception of Klein and a couple of interns at Fox, no one actually believes that focusing on the overturning of Roe V Wade constitutes a pivot to the center, even if we forget about all the times that Donald Trump has abandoned actual centrist positions from previous campaigns. Dobbs was insanely unpopular from the beginning and has only grown more so as its scope has increased and the horror stories have accumulated, and Dobbs was correct is very much Trump's position.

Here is Donald Trump bragging about ending Roe v. Wade over and over pic.twitter.com/5MdthlkZbH

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) June 24, 2024

 

RNC Chair: It is absolutely critical to remember who it was that put anti-abortion and conservative judges on the district courts, on the circuit courts, and nominated the three conservative justices to the United States Supreme Court that overturned Roe. That was Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/VY9dVHTZSX

— DNC War Room (@DNCWarRoom) June 24, 2024

[I don't hear a lot of booing.]

As spelled out in a typically solid TPM post by Emine Yücel, the Republicans have no good messaging options when it comes to reproductive rights and particularly IVF. At this point, they're simply thrashing around looking for the least bad option. Perhaps the only thing working in their favor is the reluctance of publications like the New York Times and Politico to admit they got this story wrong.