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It's a huge lack of systems thinking. It's like they believe that the universe somehow cares about what they were trying to accomplish. * If we reward schools

It's a huge lack of systems thinking. It's like they believe that the universe somehow cares about what they were trying to accomplish. * If we reward schools for increasing student test scores, then we'll have better schools. * If we fund a "war on drugs", we'll reduce the damage drugs do. * If we enact rent controls and mandate the construction of below-market rate housing units, it'll help people afford housing. This belief - that "having a goal and doing something that pattern-matches to helping" works - is incredibly dangerous in policy-makers. It's also incredibly difficult to fix, since the incentives for politicians are to make rationalizations that are convincing to voters, and that kind of reasoning is much easier to convey.

duaneb 11y ago
> If we enact rent controls and mandate the construction of below-market rate housing units, it'll help people afford housing. To be fair, this does in fact help many people afford housing. It just doesn't fix the endemic issue.
- sslayer 11y ago
  You support his point. It is a systemic issue, political patches do not work.
  - duaneb 11y ago
    I don't really see many people claiming that rent control is going to solve rent for everyone. Seems like a blatant straw-man fallacy.
- ThrustVectoring 11y ago
  These are political favors to local interest groups. It actively hurts the ability to find housing for everyone not blessed by the powers that be. Dense housing is affordable housing. When there's an empty apartment that you're moving into, where do you think the old resident moved to? There's only a few options - a new place got built that they moved into, the old resident died, the old resident moved out of the housing area, or the recursive option that cashes out into one of the previous ones. If you stop building units ("affordable housing" mandates) or arbitrarily keep low-income residents from making housing bids (rent-control), the only bids for housing are going to be from tech workers and market-rate housing gets ridiculous. Fundamentally, the problem is that there's X people who want to live in the area, and only Y housing units. The price is going to go up until the market clears. Handing out political favors so that the people who vote for you don't feel this reality isn't solving the problem: only building more housing will.
  - duaneb 11y ago
    > the problem is that there's X people who want to live in the area, and only Y housing units I don't think this is the same problem you would address by rent control. > Handing out political favors so that the people who vote for you don't feel this reality isn't solving the problem: only building more housing will. And yet, there are many people living in rent-controlled housing who would disagree with you. The person and problems you're painting do not exist outside your head.
    - ThrustVectoring 11y ago
      >I don't think this is the same problem you would address by rent control. Of course not. Rent control is fundamentally a tool for getting political benefits at the expense of economic ones. It explicitly creates winners in the voting district that implements it at the cost of losers everywhere else. It's in the same moral class as dumping toxic waste into a river. >And yet, there are many people living in rent-controlled housing who would disagree with you. I'm not at all surprised that the beneficiaries of political favors support handing out those favors.
      - duaneb 11y ago
        > Rent control is fundamentally a tool for getting political benefits at the expense of economic ones. It explicitly creates winners in the voting district that implements it at the cost of losers everywhere else. It's in the same moral class as dumping toxic waste into a river. I'd love to hear the argument for this. Again, many people living in rent-controlled houses would disagree. Just because people are poor you cannot write them off as votes.
        ThrustVectoring 11y ago
        http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html >Economists are virtually unanimous in concluding that rent controls are destructive. In a 1990 poll of 464 economists published in the May 1992 issue of the American Economic Review, 93 percent of U.S. respondents agreed, either completely or with provisos, that “a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.”
derefr 11y ago
I don't know about the universe; I think it's rather a weird sort of overly-strong faith in the capacity of other humans. Legislation at every level seems to treat the people implementing and enforcing the legislation as a fleet of magic genies, who will Do What You Mean and achieve exactly your goal with no side-effects. Though also, do note, if you apply systems thinking to legislators, establishing that they're "doing something that pattern-matches to helping" is exactly in line with their current incentives. You need much more direct oversight to give them an effective feedback loop for the consequences of their actions, rather than just the "optics" of the actions themselves. Things like https://www.trudeaumetre.ca/ https://www.trudeaumetre.ca/, but done by an opposition-minded third party who won't give them an inch but won't like like campaign ads, would be a good start. Ultimately, something like prediction markets on the upholding of each elected candidate's campaign promises during their tenure would be amazing, in the sense that sufficiently-large bets would be a form of lobbying without lobbying.
- ThrustVectoring 11y ago
  Thanks for your comment about applying systems thinking to legislators. It much more clearly captures the point I was trying to make about political incentives. The best ideas I have for fixing political structures are weird utopia-ish things that you can't get to from democracy. Things like government-by-prediction-market, which would distribute decision-making to people who think they have a better idea than everyone else and pay for performance.
cagey 11y ago
* If we fund a "war on climate change", we'll reduce the damage of (or hey, even stop!) climate change.

duaneb 11y ago

> If we enact rent controls and mandate the construction of below-market rate housing units, it'll help people afford housing. To be fair, this does in fact help many people afford housing. It just doesn't fix the endemic issue.

sslayer 11y ago
You support his point. It is a systemic issue, political patches do not work.
- duaneb 11y ago
  I don't really see many people claiming that rent control is going to solve rent for everyone. Seems like a blatant straw-man fallacy.
ThrustVectoring 11y ago
These are political favors to local interest groups. It actively hurts the ability to find housing for everyone not blessed by the powers that be. Dense housing is affordable housing. When there's an empty apartment that you're moving into, where do you think the old resident moved to? There's only a few options - a new place got built that they moved into, the old resident died, the old resident moved out of the housing area, or the recursive option that cashes out into one of the previous ones. If you stop building units ("affordable housing" mandates) or arbitrarily keep low-income residents from making housing bids (rent-control), the only bids for housing are going to be from tech workers and market-rate housing gets ridiculous. Fundamentally, the problem is that there's X people who want to live in the area, and only Y housing units. The price is going to go up until the market clears. Handing out political favors so that the people who vote for you don't feel this reality isn't solving the problem: only building more housing will.
- duaneb 11y ago
  > the problem is that there's X people who want to live in the area, and only Y housing units I don't think this is the same problem you would address by rent control. > Handing out political favors so that the people who vote for you don't feel this reality isn't solving the problem: only building more housing will. And yet, there are many people living in rent-controlled housing who would disagree with you. The person and problems you're painting do not exist outside your head.
  - ThrustVectoring 11y ago
    >I don't think this is the same problem you would address by rent control. Of course not. Rent control is fundamentally a tool for getting political benefits at the expense of economic ones. It explicitly creates winners in the voting district that implements it at the cost of losers everywhere else. It's in the same moral class as dumping toxic waste into a river. >And yet, there are many people living in rent-controlled housing who would disagree with you. I'm not at all surprised that the beneficiaries of political favors support handing out those favors.
    - duaneb 11y ago
      > Rent control is fundamentally a tool for getting political benefits at the expense of economic ones. It explicitly creates winners in the voting district that implements it at the cost of losers everywhere else. It's in the same moral class as dumping toxic waste into a river. I'd love to hear the argument for this. Again, many people living in rent-controlled houses would disagree. Just because people are poor you cannot write them off as votes.
      - ThrustVectoring 11y ago
        http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html >Economists are virtually unanimous in concluding that rent controls are destructive. In a 1990 poll of 464 economists published in the May 1992 issue of the American Economic Review, 93 percent of U.S. respondents agreed, either completely or with provisos, that “a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.”

derefr 11y ago

I don't know about the universe; I think it's rather a weird sort of overly-strong faith in the capacity of other humans. Legislation at every level seems to treat the people implementing and enforcing the legislation as a fleet of magic genies, who will Do What You Mean and achieve exactly your goal with no side-effects. Though also, do note, if you apply systems thinking to legislators, establishing that they're "doing something that pattern-matches to helping" is exactly in line with their current incentives. You need much more direct oversight to give them an effective feedback loop for the consequences of their actions, rather than just the "optics" of the actions themselves. Things like https://www.trudeaumetre.ca/ https://www.trudeaumetre.ca/, but done by an opposition-minded third party who won't give them an inch but won't like like campaign ads, would be a good start. Ultimately, something like prediction markets on the upholding of each elected candidate's campaign promises during their tenure would be amazing, in the sense that sufficiently-large bets would be a form of lobbying without lobbying.

ThrustVectoring 11y ago
Thanks for your comment about applying systems thinking to legislators. It much more clearly captures the point I was trying to make about political incentives. The best ideas I have for fixing political structures are weird utopia-ish things that you can't get to from democracy. Things like government-by-prediction-market, which would distribute decision-making to people who think they have a better idea than everyone else and pay for performance.

cagey 11y ago

* If we fund a "war on climate change", we'll reduce the damage of (or hey, even stop!) climate change.