3 ms·

Tax political involvement?

• pas 4y ago
  Tax non-constructivity. Someone wants to build a bike lane. Someone says no, because X, Y, Z. Okay, but let's propose something else. Many times there are solutions that at least would seem to satisfy the involved parties, but no one has the money for that. Okay, so the difference between the original and the 100%-satisfaction solution now has more stakeholders, so let's involve them in the financing. Obviously (?) there's no ready made framework for this, the problem is very hard in general (game theory, sociopolitics, plus the various concrete engineering constraints of the problems), but at least some kind of approximation of it would help to uncover the hidden externalities, clarify the positions of the various stakeholders, quantify the difference between the possible options, and so on. Yes, in practice (eg. in case of a bike lane) it might be that the just do it solution costs 1000K and the 100%-satisfaction one would cost 15 trillion dollars, and we're absolutely no closer to deciding whether the problem that the bike lane would solve is one that needs solving, but at least now there is a design space, at least the parties acknowledge the problem, and so on. Basically, it would be good to tax situations where the high-high-high level solution is to get out of that situation. (Eg. if you don't like a region and you bitch about it for decades and stop any kind of change, then maybe you should have found one that you like a long time ago.) Would this help cooperation and would this help smooth out local decisionmaking? Maybe eventually. Maybe it's a complete abstract pipedream that would just pour some nice hypergolic fuel on every low intensity city conflict... :]