The bulldozer vs. vetocracy political axis

https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/12/19/bullveto.html

by galfarragem • 5 years ago

184 131 5 years ago

vorpalhex4• 5 years ago

One of the issues this has missed is whether consent is needed.

Put another way:

Bob lives on 200 acres and wants to construct an apartment building on that land. Nobody can really see it, he has agreed to provide parking and services, etc.

Sally owns a small residential house in a historic neighborhood. She wants to tear down her house and make a narrow four-story apartment building. She can't provide any room for parking and depends fully on city utilities.

Sally has more impact on her neighbors than Bob does. It's reasonable for Bob to merely have a question of general freedom. Sally on the other hand is clearly impacting her neighbors - and not every neighbor could do what Sally wants to do.

Some freedoms can impact the freedoms of other people, and that is when the consent of those other people is needed.

mbot53242• 5 years ago

Choosing to recognize the causal impact of one's actions of one type on another's freedom of some type is itself a political decision. Being able to argue a causal chain of one action to another impact does not make it the sole narrative -- only a more likely narrative than some other non-coherent chain.

Your choice of raising your child under one religion directly impacts the cultural environment my child enters into at a minimum, if not the outright practices my child would be forced to participate in. The US government recognizes a freedom of religion and therefore does not recognize any impact from that freedom as an infringement on others.

AlexTWithBeard3• 5 years ago

1. Have all these limitations been known to Sally when she bought her house?

2. Do Bob's rights change if someone builds a historic house next to his lot? Or it would be fair to say that Bob came here first so everyone else may just gtfo?

vorpalhex4• 5 years ago

That was sort of the purpose of making his lot so large in the hypothetical.

But let's change it. Let's say Bob is running a rather large nuclear reactor. Initially this is fine - nobody is around him and nuclear power is very environmentally friendly. However, time goes on, and after a few years Bob and his large homemade nuclear reactor are surrounded by hundreds of brand new but very full preschools all bordering his property.

Do we have a right to ask Bob to stop running his nuclear reactor? Situations change, risk models change. What was originally fine is now a hazard to other people.

arethuza2• 5 years ago

What if Bob is in a country where people have the freedom to wander around most of Bob's 200 acres?

AlexTWithBeard3• 5 years ago

How does it change the original question?

iskander• 5 years ago

Funny how we interpret these situations differently: Bob is going to destroy wildlife habitat, which we should treat as a public good. Sally is going to provide additional housing in a dense urban area, which we should also treat as a public good.

My ideal would be significantly less interference and oversight for Sally than Bob.

vorpalhex4• 5 years ago

Who says the 200 acres isn't farm land which already doesn't support wildlife?

And Sally may be providing more housing, but she is also making significantly more income and can do so subsidized by her neighbors. Her housing is also likely to go to higher income residents as it would be new housing in an expensive area - and those residents will have less space and no yard.

anonymoushn2• 5 years ago

Why do people who live in Sally's city need cars?

It seems like the choice to impose parking minimums on apartment and home owners instead of building train tracks is one that should be weighed according to its externalities.

michaelt• 5 years ago

The problem is: If I build and sell a home with no parking, there's no legal mechanism that can stop the new owner from buying a car anyway, and parking it on the street.

That might be OK if there's physically no on-street parking within walking distance - this is the case in central London, for example. Or if I can convince someone on the council to pass a new law specific to my building.

culi• 5 years ago

Hmmm it's interesting to think about how we'd consider these examples if we had a more relational worldview. Bob's apartment building on that land might not affect any humans. But we live in a more-than-human world. What of the impact on the environment, the diversity of the soil organisms, or the ecological impact? Maybe some rare bird species would have an advocate for them in the form of some ornithology conservationist expert, but what about the endemic soil organism that hasn't yet been described by science?

Ultimately, you could argue, that those things eventually have some level of impact on other humans since we live in such an interconnected world. But why do we have to make the wellbeing of those creatures only justified as valuable by how they impact humans? Isn't the centering of humans in our value system ultimately a political ideology? Why do we take that for granted and prioritize that ideology and not others?

I think the insight I get from practices like the OP article is that all of these axes just capture a little bit more. But there's always gonna be things left out. The risk with political compasses is our tendency to mistake the Map for the Territory

rectang• 5 years ago

My first reaction was that I don't want a bulldozer to be able to seize and consolidate power, then to create a permanent vetocracy so that their hold on power can never be challenged.

macintux• 5 years ago

A very timely concern.

mbot53242• 5 years ago

Bulldozers breed vetocracies which breed bulldozers in turn. Stable, long lasting power counter-balances itself with a host of ongoing concessions to each side of this coin.

epistasis4• 5 years ago

I like this axis a lot, and think that it is probably the most important political axis at this moment in history (where I give great weight to my local and state politics, and to international concerns like climate change and global pandemic).

BUT I really hate the term "bulldozer" for the opposite of vetocracy, because bulldozers destroy and flatten, they do not build interesting and useful things. They might make room for something useful, but they may bulldoze something and leave it empty.

I'd prefer the term "Do-ocracy" in opposition to "vetocracy." Do I have the licenses to do things on my own, or is everything forbidden until explicitly approved by the vast majority of interested parties? That's the key concern that affects all sorts of governance from large corporations to startups to political organizations to actual zoning laws.

ip26• 5 years ago

Autonomo-cracy?

Carte blanche seems like the appropriate descriptor, but impossible to shoe-horn in.

meheleventyone• 5 years ago

Isn't the point that they could potentially do either and its any third-party concerns that get flattened?

So something more like a permissive-cracy.

Pxtl• 5 years ago

The idea is that bulldozers bash through obstacles. You could also use a battering ram as metaphor. The point is that they get crap done regardless of what's in the way.

Some red tape exists for good reasons. We always have to balance thalidomide vs housing crisis.

SpicyLemonZest• 5 years ago

I definitely would put myself far on the “just do stuff” side of the spectrum, but I think it’s fair that the names for both sides identify what opponents might not like. “Bulldozer” is a very apt name, because one of the key arguments in favor of local veto points is the big urban projects of the mid 20th century, when lots of interesting and useful neighborhoods were flattened to build highway interchanges.

epistasis4• 5 years ago

I would also argue that it's nearly always legal to bulldoze things, and the vetocracy doesn't really care if I bulldoze my house. There are only a very very few jurisdictions where demolition permits are an impediment. So the vetocracy is generally just fine with bulldozers.

It's the actual building of things that the vetocracy wants to prevent. For example, check out this comment (whose factual basis is quite low based on my knowledge) which I think is great example of the vetocracy. If the luxury condos in SOMA were bulldozed, that would probably be a good result in their eyes!

The housing market example is bizarre, because if you go look at San Francisco, the entire area of SOMA is dominated by skyscrapers and luxury condos that are 90% vacant. Office buildings are going vacant at an accelerated rate. Salesforce Tower has never managed to fill up on tenants. We don't need to build new housing, we just need to actually price the ones we do have so people can afford them. Stop bulldozing stuff built less than 20 years ago to replace it with even more shoddily built stuff you can sell for even higher margins. We already have the homes, just let people live in them.

skybrian2• 5 years ago

I think it's reasonable because bulldozers are often used to level the ground when something large is built.

Also, the other end of the axis is also a negative term, so it's balanced.

neilk• 5 years ago

I understand where you’re coming from, but in my experience, “Do-ocracy” implies a kind of passive consensus mechanism. Let’s say we all have collective ownership of a garden, and it’s starting to need weeding, but nobody’s taken the initiative to fix it yet. In do-ocratic fashion, someone announces that this coming Sunday is Weeding Party day, and that catalyzes action.

It’s tricky. “Weeding Party Day” will succeed if everyone has been made to see this is desirable, and if the person has charisma or a track record or seems well organized. But it’s a dance between collective will and individual will.

With “bulldozery” I think Vitalik is describing an extreme case where some entity is completely unfettered. A dictator decides it’s Weeding Party day, or an all-powerful council, or even a single individual goes and pays for a weeding crew and reaps the rewards themselves. So at this extreme point we find everything from The Great Leap Forward to the enclosure of the commons by capitalists or the seizing of lands by colonists.

Action and will for its own sake have long been associated with fascism; many people long for a strongman to clear away all the objections to “greatness”. But the tendency exists in all kinds of people, I think, it’s just that their desires for sweeping reform aren’t as violent.

novok• 5 years ago

I think bulldozer is a great term, because it also captures the 'creative destruction' that occurs when the new better thing replaces the old thing, like google replacing altavista / yahoo, facebook replacing myspace and so on, the iPhone replacing the iPod for the most part and so on.

Also all the other terms I've heard so far are not catchy.

hammock• 5 years ago

There is a brilliant, literal bulldozer story about Chicago's lost third airport.

For years there was a busy and successful commercial airport in downtown Chicago right on Lake Michigan. At some point Mayor Daley decided he wanted it closed for his own agenda, but no one else would let it happen.

So, in the middle of one dark night in 2003, he got some contractor cronies to go out there and bulldoze the runway, damaging it beyond repair. This forced the closing of the airport.

Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley forced the closing of Meigs in 2003 by ordering the overnight bulldozing of its runway without notice, in violation of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations.

To this day, the site of the former airport is an undeveloped "natural preserve" and most Chicagoans have no idea that it used to be somewhere they could fly out of.

Funny story.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meigs_Field

lenzm• 5 years ago

It's not undeveloped, there's a park and music venue there now. I don't think it is a leap to say it is now used by many more Chicagoans than the airport for private jets ever was, even if most Chicagoans are unaware.

vilhelm_s• 5 years ago

Oh wow, that used to be the default starting airport in Microsoft Flight Simulator, I must have taken off from it a million simulated times as a kid...

wpietri• 5 years ago

Do you have a citation on "busy and successful"? I lived in Chicago in the 1990s and I remember Meigs Field as niche curiosity. The only airports I or anybody I knew used were O'Hare and Midway, both reasonable transit rides from downtown.

JetAlone• 5 years ago

Reminds me of the story of Denver International Airport's unnecessary construction.

AnthonyMouse11• 5 years ago

We could use the terms conservative and progressive, but then someone's head might explode when Bitcoin gets called a progressive attack on conservative institutions.

Barrin922• 5 years ago

Bitcoin certainly is an attack on institutions, but not progressive in character. All the institutions it (claims to) bypass like regulators, the state, central banks, the tax system and so on, with the exception of borders maybe are quite liberal in the broad sense of the term.

II2II• 5 years ago

I watched a documentary about Jane Jacobs the other night, a woman who was involved in saving a neighbourhood I used to live in. I now live in a neighbourhood that was grazed (thankfully not razed) by similar development attempts and the city is now looking into restoring its former vibrance by undoing the damage that was done.

It should be clear from my sentiments that I should be screaming the virtues of the vetocracy and the evils of bulldozer politics, but I'm not. The reality is that these two poles have very different visions. Maligning one over the other, may it be with the term "bulldozer" or "veto", fails to appreciate that. It papers over that one side scaffolds their fear of the unknown with one set of arguments and the other side veils their ignorance of the consequences of their actions with another set of arguments.

tuatoru• 5 years ago

The opposite to "vetocracy" would be "probocracy" from the Latin probo, I approve. Bulldozers vs vetocracy doesn't seem quite right to me as a political axis.

Though, to effectively adapt infrastructure and structures to cope with climate-change-enhanced weather, we're going to have to allow governments to become bulldozers.

davidw• 5 years ago

Interesting idea. I would quibble a bit with some of the stuff around zoning. There are tons of left-wing places like San Francisco that have an enormous amount of zoning and regulation around building homes - including areas where it's not legal to build anything other than single family units.

One of the things I've found a bit refreshing about the YIMBY movement is that it is not really on one side of our political "trenches" - things like abortion or guns where the lines are drawn and you can mostly predict how someone votes by their party affiliation. Means there is a bit of room for some alliances - and also that people of your same party won't necessarily "have your back".

epistasis4• 5 years ago

I think that it's important to both separate out the left/right axis from the vetocracy axis. But also to realize that even if one professes leftism on the National scale when it may not affect one's significant privileges, that at the local level that "leftism" may dissipate when it results in very real dissipation of one's significant privileges that happen only locally.

DarylZero• 5 years ago

Right. Even most American leftists are much less leftist regarding the broader "world system" into which America fits -- compare self-professed "progressivism" to something like Maoism-Third Worldism.

guerrilla• 5 years ago

I was prepared to be annoyed, but I think this might have actually contributed something. In political science, there are many axes/spectrums to grade things on and even more ways to quantify them, but I haven't actually heard of this one specifically yet. Big fan of the whimsical naming too :)

Also, I love the idea meta-political compass... As someone who's been on Twitter, yeah, that's a thing. We need a meta-meta-political compass now though. Let's fractal this.

HPsquared• 5 years ago

The 100-dimensional political model https://youtu.be/UuopBeaUN24

(Satire... I think)

dragonwriter• 5 years ago

In political science, there are many axes/spectrums to grade things on and even more ways to quantify them, but I haven't actually heard of this one specifically yet.

Inventing political axes is an easy polisci game. Pick any political phenomenon, now take its negation or inversion, boom, political axes.

Descriptively meaningful political axes are derived from empirical measurement of political behavior within a domain of analysis, but most proposed political axes aren't intended to be descriptively meaningful, they are tools for advocacy.

VictorPath• 5 years ago

restrictive housing

I visited San Francisco thirty years ago and surveyed somewhat the effects of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Collapsed freeways and so forth were still visible. I think of this as I hear the Milennium tower is sinking into the sand - and San Francisco has not been hit by an earthquake for a while. I don't know what the future of building upward in the city will be.

Why not fix up Caltrain? Why not have BART be fixed up and something people find safe and convenient instead of curse?

Decent public transportation is not completely absent in the US. Decent public transport from the East Bay would fix a lot of problems.

I don't think "remove regulation on business" is some stroke of genius, it sounds fairly lazy. Real estate developers are not some oppressed group, they tend to run local politics in most of the country.

frenchyatwork• 5 years ago

Real estate developers are not some oppressed group, they tend to run local politics in most of the country.

I think the people who run local politics are often the people who own lots of real estate, not necessarily those who build buildings/improvements on it. Often, they're seeking to maintain or improve the value of their existing estate.

friedman23• 5 years ago

Your comment just doesn't make any sense in the context of this article. It almost reads like complete gibberish.

teachrdan2• 5 years ago

I have an unpopular answer. Back in the oughts, companies like Google and Facebook started running charter buses that stopped illegally at public bus stops to ferry their employees to the south bay. If those people had taken public transit instead we would have pumped billions of dollars into Caltrain, enough to fund vastly improved services.

There would definitely have been an adjustment period where more people would have driven and made traffic even worse. But that discomfort would have helped create the political will to improve public transit.

skybrian2• 5 years ago

But you might also think of these private bus fleets as a reaction to the vetocracies delaying or outright preventing significant public transportation improvements. Large corporations might be more willing to fund public transport if they thought it would work?

For example, many of Google's new campuses are have very good connections to public transport, so it's not like they're inherently against it.

epistasis4• 5 years ago

If those people had taken public transit instead we would have pumped billions of dollars into Caltrain

This denies the actual reality of the situation in that there was no public transit that was equivalent, the local political power structure is hostile to improved transit, and the power structure is in particular extremely opposed to transit that might be used by tech workers, much less predominantly used by tech workers. During the recent Caltrain electrification battle, there was a large anti-Caltrain political force because it was seen as "for tech workers."

nitwit005• 5 years ago

They blamed the rising housing costs and changing neighborhoods on the tech workers. They would have opposed public transit alternatives as well. They didn't want those people living in SF and working elsewhere.

anonymoushn2• 5 years ago

If those people had taken public transit instead their commutes would have been twice as long innit.

ZoomerCretin• 5 years ago

https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Bay-Area-earthquake-l...

Most of the earthquake safe areas in San Francisco aren't zoned for density. Many of the denser areas are in high-risk liquefaction zones. If you don't support building in high-risk areas, then you should support upzoning the low-risk areas, which today are predominately low-density residential areas.

Real estate developers are not some oppressed group, they tend to run local politics in most of the country.

I don't think they "run local politics" in any major city in the United States. Typically that description belongs to incumbent homeowner NIMBYs.

hash8724• 5 years ago

Good piece. I'd tend to argue more for mild vetocracies/Madisonian political systems with multiple checks & balances when we're constructing actual governments. Many people heavily involved in politics ("intense policy demanders", I've heard them called) are just moderately insane overall, so I'm pretty interested in blocking bad ideas and rapid change. I'm kind of small c conservative that way. (I agree the US Senate should have a supermajority voting requirement, etc.)

One thing that makes some vetocracies illegitimate, however, is that a small group of people wield far outsized power relative to their numbers. This is the objection to say a tiny group of wealthy, usually elderly people who can block new housing construction based on complaints about 'neighborhood character'. I'm fine with actual gridlock some issues where the US is genuinely divided, but I object to a tiny tiny minority with outsized power. Contrary to popular belief, James Madison was actually against too much minority power and had a few rants in the Federalist Papers about how democratic systems should be majority rule-only

clairity2• 5 years ago

an axis is literally dichotomizing, and dichotomies don't aid understanding of complex, dynamic systems because of the numerous chaotic (i.e., higher order) drivers of phenomena within the system. dichotomies provide faux-understanding, allowing the speaker to feel esteem for knowing about the dichotomy, not the underlying system of which s/he speaks. it is literally bullshit.

i'll repeat that the only useful dichotomy when talking about political systems (practically tautologically) is that between the powerful and the powerless. left/right, liberal/conservative, even bulldozer/vetocrat are all distractions on this fundamental characteristic of political systems. it's especially important that when we voters consider elections and policy positions, we do it based on a critical reasoning of the issues at hand, not a political affiliation or chosen dichotomous self-identification.

Ajedi32• 5 years ago

I actually appreciate the introduction of additional axis into the discussion, as I feel it helps cure that sort of dichotomic, tribalistic thinking. No model is perfect, but better to have a dozen different arbitrary dimensions of ideological spectra than just one. It's certainly a better model of reality than the strict left/right dichotomy that dominates modern political discourse.

inglor_cz• 5 years ago

One of the problems with supermajorities is that you give greater weight to status quo.

With supermajorities required, few countries would ever get rid of slavery or the death penalty, give voting rights to women etc.

A lot of the grandfathered defaults aren't worth a supermajority to overturn.

hash8724• 5 years ago

Not sure you picked the best examples there- both of these things required a Constitutional amendment, aka had to pass both houses by a 2/3rds vote, then be voted in by three quarters of the states. That's like the definition of a supermajority, so pretty much the opposite of your point. To be fair, it was much easier to pass the 13th Amendment when the rebelling states didn't get a vote in the matter :)

To your broader point- radical change can just as equally be bad as good, so it should require more than a bare majority. (Personally I think the US Senate should require 55 votes for cloture, not 60). Some pretty radical stuff could have been passed in 2017-2018 if we just used a majority in both houses. I think with the current level of political fanaticism in the US, making it a bit difficult to pass laws is a wise choice

helen___keller• 5 years ago

This is the objection to say a tiny group of wealthy, usually elderly people who can block new housing construction based on complaints about 'neighborhood character'.

Where I live, it’s not a small wealthy group blocking new construction, it’s that the region is already as built out as is legal in most places, and updates to municipal zoning is a supermajority vote so it almost never happens. Most construction happens via petitioning the zoning board for a variance

civilized• 5 years ago

Many people heavily involved in politics ("intense policy demanders", I've heard them called) are just moderately insane overall, so I'm pretty interested in blocking bad ideas and rapid change.

I won't deny it's frustrating that some things are so impossible in our system, but I also won't deny the schadenfreude I feel when the zealots of today's fashionable nonsense ideologies can't get their way because the system requires so much consensus:

"No, the rules aren't great, but they're good enough. Sorry, you don't get to play tyrant-visionary in this lifetime. Better luck next life!"

throwaway20482• 5 years ago

Plenty of countries that have simple majoritarian systems, even on what the USA would consider constitutional issues haven't fallen to tyranny.

stormbrew2• 5 years ago

(I agree the US Senate should have a supermajority voting requirement, etc.)

The senate is inherently anti-majoritarian, in that it half of all senators can represent vastly more than half of all citizens. When you pile on a legislative super-majority it just becomes absurd. At a 60 vote requirement, something like 25% of the population potentially holds veto power over the other 75%.

That ain't mild.

throwaway20482• 5 years ago

It is not a 25% population requirement, its a 5% one, that is, you only need 5% of voters to vote for your party in senate seats effective hold onto a majority proof veto.

The senate is fundamentally an anti-democratic rule-by-minority institution that represents land area over top of human beings.

Its as serious as a problem some other democracies and polities have faced

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs

In the UK it almost caused a revolution, because it allowed the wealthy and corrupt to hold onto power, while denying representation to new cities with huge population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sejm_of_the_Polish%E2%80%93Lit...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto

In the Polish Lithuanian commonwealth every senator held veto power, in practice this meant that an insane amount of corruption occurred (including senators being bought off by foreign nations), and it totally neutered their power as a state to fend of military rivals, and eventually ended up with the nation conquered.

The senate is in desperate need of reform, and is a key part of why democracy is failing in the USA.

kelseyfrog• 5 years ago

One thing that makes some vetocracies illegitimate, however, is that a small group of people wield far outsized power relative to their numbers.
I agree the US Senate should have a supermajority voting requirement

You might be looking at things differently, but to me there is a lot of friction between these two statements. The US Senate is the perfect example of a small group of people who wield outsized power relative to their numbers[1]. The small group of people are the small[2] state electors. The combination of rigid state boundaries, fixed representation, and population migration are necessary and sufficient conditions to power imbalance. Redistricting states, proportional representation, or serfdom are the antidotes[3]. In my mind this is the preeminent issue of our time. It is strife with dilemmas which culminate in an inability to make any meaningful structural change. The problem with these situations is that absent a viable legal path toward change, extra-legal change is an inevitable result[4].

1. https://www.bloombergquint.com/view/senate-power-imbalance-t...

2. In population.

3. With obvious pros and cons and palatability.

4. See all revolutions ever.

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

Or, capitalism vs the EU

I don't think it s a valid axis though because it doesn't encompass most of the political spectrum. It describes only 2 flavors of liberarianism, one is completely individualist, and the other is slightly less so in an attempt to build consensus. Also, what are the intermediate points?

lil_dispaches2• 5 years ago

Bulldoze vs Vetocracy is not an axis.

Left/Right, and Lib/Auth, are axis, of political "persuasion"; they are suited for Venn diagrammatic overlap. You can be both leftist and rightish (centrist).

Bulldoze and Vetocracy are modes (of governance, of process, etc). You can't be both bulldozery and vetocratic on a topic. If a process is half bulldozer, half vetocratic, the effect would be a policy wash, and external factors will decide.

As the article explains, the qualifications of Bulldoze/Veto exists on different levels (outside vs inside, level 1 vs level 2, foreign vs domestic).

Ergo: Axis are extensive, in that you can parse what is lefty and what is righty about a single part of the system (eg. a particular law).

Ergo: The Bulldozer system is intensive: you can't pull apart a law and say "this is mostly bulldozer, but a little veto".

The intensive applies to processes, the extensive applies to the participants and/or the product.

analog31• 5 years ago

>> Bulldoze vs Vetocracy is not an axis.

Indeed, these are just tactics, that can be chosen by anybody on any axis.

AnthonyMouse11• 5 years ago

You can't be both bulldozery and vetocratic on a topic. If a process is half bulldozer, half vetocratic, the effect would be a policy wash, and external factors will decide.

It's still a spectrum. Take driving. The maximally-bulldozery position is that no licensing is required, no traffic regulations exist, the ability to drive is gated solely by the ability to reach the pedals and even that isn't a law. The maximally-vetocratic position is that cars are prohibited. The moderate position is that adults can drive if they pass a basic driving test and there are fines for risky behavior.

lil_dispaches2• 5 years ago

Nice try, but You conflate the process with the policy/position. It is not a "bulldozer position" to say "anybody can drive", that is an extreme Libertarian position. Bulldozer is not a position. Libertarianism a process.

A middle of the road position could be had through either bulldozery or vetocracy; furthermore, from the law or position itself, you could not say whether it was produced by bulldozer or vetocracy, you would need to know truths about the system.

bell-cot• 5 years ago

Kinda similar is "scaling restriction" - how true it is that "you have the right to do X" means that "you have the right to do X, repeatedly, at scale, and/or automated". There are a whole lotta things (from groundwater extraction to burning fallen leaves to sending e-mails) that are pretty harmless on a small scale, but...

Jasper_2• 5 years ago

The housing market example is bizarre, because if you go look at San Francisco, the entire area of SOMA is dominated by skyscrapers and luxury condos that are 90% vacant. Office buildings are going vacant at an accelerated rate. Salesforce Tower has never managed to fill up on tenants. We don't need to build new housing, we just need to actually price the ones we do have so people can afford them. Stop bulldozing stuff built less than 20 years ago to replace it with even more shoddily built stuff you can sell for even higher margins. We already have the homes, just let people live in them.

"Bulldoze or not" is not a helpful axis, because it implies that the new stuff will be better. But that's not a given, and I'm very suspicious to trust the people who built apartments which are 90% empty. The analogy also helpfully applies to blockchain technology.

kurthr2• 5 years ago

I learned something early this year from a friend in the finance industry. Part of the reason you find so many empty overpriced new apartments/condos/commercial is that they are written into the loan... and if even a single unit is rented/sold below the rate that was contracted the entire loan has to be renegotiated/paid within the year. If you're speculating on price increases, there's no reason to rent any of them.

Frankly, when there is so much empty space the desire for increased building, higher density, and reduced code requirements just looks like what builder/speculators want... not what will increase actual affordable housing for people with jobs (who need to get there somehow). The whole 22 bus line as a "Transit Corridor" is a joke that lets developers use public space for private profit... the Safeway parking lot is already half full at 3am and apparently they're planning to start charging for it!

Why not just do what Vancouver did and put an annual fee on empty (no renter on taxes, resident owner on taxes, or going concern on rolls) residential/commercial to curb speculation? Because the developers who fund local politicians would lose money. Further, they would threaten the politicians with "no one will ever build here again because of these fees!".

Jasper_2• 5 years ago

i do not give a shit if the developers who make houses people do not live in do not build here again. neither should the politicians. our lives will improve if they go away forever. we already have all the houses we need, we just need to stop bulldozing them and instead start handing them out.

if they actually do not want to build here, maybe they should have thought of that before building houses nobody lives in. people should live in the houses.

CryptoPunk• 5 years ago

Source on 90% vacancy? I find that completely implausible.

assbuttbuttass• 5 years ago

The political compass comparison threw me off at the beginning, but this piece actually has some good points.

cturner2• 5 years ago

"Cryptocurrency proponents often cite Citadel interfering in Gamestop trading as an example of the opaque, centralized (and bulldozery) manipulation that they are fighting against."

This has an air of mob justice to it. If enough people believe it, that does not make it the truth.

It is not established that Citadel interfered and they have flatly denied all accusations. Griffin has denied it under oath.

People who are tempted by this truthy narrative should think back to the "flash crash" of 2010. For years, the mob treated it as common wisdom that the event was caused by rogue high-frequency trading. Years later it came out that the responsibility was with (1) an unsophisticated trader interacting with a GUI who was knowingly and regularly breaking market rules and (2) the exchange he was operating on did not have adequate market-abuse monitoring.

Ntrails• 5 years ago

I have explained multiple times why trading got shut down, how robinhood got caught short of margin, how we can literally see from released data that Citadels flows were not particularly sided.

Never the less, the same people who now understand what happened continue to use it as a hill to stick an anti establishment flag upon

nceqs3• 5 years ago

Meanwhile the PE firms that owned the bonds are now converting them into equity, dumping it on retail and cashing out.

DUDE WE ARE STICKING IT TO THE MAN SO BAD. SILVER LAKE IS JUST LIKE US.

wallacoloo• 5 years ago

i think it’s just bad UX. my understanding is that Citadel acts as the market maker for Robinhood. if it ever can’t provide liquidity for a trade, you need to handle that case explicitly. make it clear to the user where liquidity comes from and how much of it there is, otherwise they can’t reach for any cause besides “Robinhood (Citadel) decided to pull a switch”. order books used to serve that role: i’m not sure what the solution is in this era of HFT.

maicro• 5 years ago

Setting aside anything else going on, thank you for bringing up and clarifying the 2010 flash crash - I had only ever heard the high-frequency trading theory (with a side order of "nobody actually understands what the bots were thinking").

armchairhacker• 5 years ago

I think the larger issue (which Vitalik actually mentions a lot in this article) is that crypto is also bulldozery and the same stuff can happen.

In fact, something very similar did happen when etherium forked after the [edit] DAO hack.

At the end of the day, whoever has the resources has the power.

leppr• 5 years ago

The Ethereum hard fork was in 2016 after the hack of a project called just "DAO" [1].

No other on-chain event since then, including the recent BadgerDAO hack, motivated a hard fork.

Vitalk's article is quite precise about these subtleties, concluding that crypto is generally vetocracy at the lower level and bulldozer-y higher in the stack.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)

will4274• 5 years ago

Years later it came out [...]

Maybe. Wikipedia has a lot more to say https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash. More than a few folks quoted there seem to say that while this is what the final SEC report said, it's basically ludicrous to blame an individual and doesn't match the data very well.

js8• 5 years ago

IMHO this distinction is just conservative vs liberal.

Honestly, I am not a fan of political compass, I think there are three independent dimensions based on three major moral values:

- conservativism (value of authority and cultural preservation)

- liberalism (value of individual freedom and meritocratic progress)

- socialism/progressivism (value of equal participation in society and democracy)

Each of these gives a worldview and a way to address equality, freedom, justice, authority; and each suggests what societal and economic institutions should look like. They can be also combined, they are not always contradictory. And each system has its own "vice" - type of selfish corruption.

Left vs right has shifted through history, originally it was liberalism+socialism against conservativism, slowly liberalism was coopted by the right instead.

That's why the OP's axis is a tension between conservative and liberal, because it is missing from political compass. But it was always present in capitalism (in fact Marx described it as capital accumulation - liberals who accrue property thanks to "merit" become conservative incumbents).

twic• 5 years ago

Of course, "authoritarian vs libertarian" and "left vs right" are both incredibly un-nuanced gross oversimplifications.

Right, but they aren't chosen at random. These are the two axes which empirically fall out if you do principal component analysis on people's policy beliefs:

http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/wwwitter/20050415-my_country...

Whereas Vitalik's axes are pulled directly out of, at best, thin air.

AnthonyMouse11• 5 years ago

Isn't that just "wet streets cause rain"?

Once you tell people that one tribe is the Left and the other is the Right and they choose one to align with, they're inclined to pick up its other positions out of tribal loyalty. That doesn't mean they're actually principled policy groupings. They're just how a coalition shakes out when you need 50%+1 to win.

enragedcacti2• 5 years ago

Studies have confirmed that the structures of the brain vary in size predictably on the left/right political axis. [1]

None of that necessarily invalidates what you are saying but I wouldn't expect to see that correlation if there weren't at least some underlying association within policy groups.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_political_orientat...

saurik• 5 years ago

What makes the axes everyone normally argues about interesting is that people actually tend to have a "position" along them, a property that isn't undermined by the idea that there are numerous different axes people might choose as long as the various resulting axes still allow you to at-least-usually place people along them somewhere (see "Phaedrus's knife"). I thereby challenge anyone who thinks that "bulldozer vs. vetocracy" is a useful "political axis" (I am not arguing that it isn't a useful distinction or even terminology, only that it isn't a "political axis" comparable to any of the others presented in this article) to answer the question of where Vitalik--someone who explicitly tries to argue in this very article that blockchain consensus layers should be a vetocracy (which, by the way, I would argue isn't actually true in a useful way of Ethereum itself, but that's an entirely separate rant) but that application layers should actively support bulldozers--falls along his own axis, because it would seem like he is a clear disproof of his own mental model. I will assert an actually useful "political axis" would need to have this I'm-betting-extreme mix of positions on one side and something in opposition to Vitalik on the other.

pessimizer• 5 years ago

If you switch the word "disruptive" for "likely to have negative externalities", this seems less like two descriptions of opposing philosophies than a single way to lionize the people who support the thing you want to do while caricaturing the people who don't support the thing you want to do.

1) There's nobody who supports the idea of letting any idea be vetoed by anyone. It's not a belief that people have. People have a variety of ideas about how a variety of things should be organized, and who should have standing to keep other people from doing things. This is the entire purpose of political philosophy.

2) It's entirely self-serving and situational; the real distinction is who the negative externalities will affect. "Bulldozers" immediately become "vetoers" when somebody is proposing something that might as a consequence keep them from driving their bulldozers wherever they want.

You might as well classify the world as "players" and "haters." Players are people who let me do what I want, and haters are the people who hate on that.

marginalia_nu• 5 years ago

There's nobody who supports the idea of letting any idea be vetoed by anyone.

Well, between IBM and Poland-Lithuania, it's not like liberum veto hasn't been tried (with moderate intermediate success and long-term problems as a result).

com2kid• 5 years ago

1) There's nobody who supports the idea of letting any idea be vetoed by anyone. It's not a belief that people have.

No, but many existing systems of governance allow (nearly) anyone to raise an objection, thereby delaying the decision making process. If a concerted effort by enough "anyones" is made, a decision can be forcefully delayed long enough that it is essentially halted.

For certain processes (e.g. environmental reviews in certain states or municipalities) this entire setup is arguably by design.

AnthonyMouse11• 5 years ago

The problem with "likely to have negative externalities" is that if you ask whether something has negative externalities, the answer is always yes.

If you carry on breathing, you're emitting CO2 and remain in competition for scarce resources with anyone else who is still alive. If you take your own life you're wasting the resources society invested in your education and causing work for emergency services. Both doing and not doing anything has negative externalities.

One of the things that has negative externalities is accounting for negative externalities. It has transaction costs and compliance costs and enforcement costs.

This implies that there is a level of negative externalities where the cost of preventing them is more than the cost of incurring them. The key is to catch the breakeven point and not go too far in either direction.

philips• 5 years ago

The breathing thing is a pretty poor analogy.

The problem with climate change is not living things breathing. It is the insertion of net new carbon into our carbon cycle by digging it out of the ground and burning it.

dvt• 5 years ago

Every post I read by Vitalik reeks of political science 101. It's like these people (I'm including Ezra Klein here) haven't bothered to read Plato's Republic or Hobbes' Leviathan. A few points:

The case for vetocracy in these contexts is clear: it gives people a feeling of safety that the platform they build or invest on is not going to suddenly change the rules on them one day and destroy everything they've put years of their time or money into.

This is simply wrong. Vetocracy is the game equivalent of a stalemate. It's definitionally an inept form of governance. There are no pros to vetocracy, and no case to be made for it. I'm not going to cite the Vox article here, but Ezra Klein has no idea what a vetocracy is, either. (Actually, he's a pretty smart guy, he's probably just being purposefully obtuse.) Vitalik is just messing up definitions here, he's not saying anything even remotely interesting.

Ethereum protocol research is sometimes bulldozery in operation

This sentence (and the following paragraph) means nothing. Research is definitionally done by one dude in his garage (barring edge cases like weapons, viruses, human testing, etc.). Why would you even need sign-off for it? His point just makes no sense.

The physical world has too much vetocracy, but the digital world has too many bulldozers, and there are no digital places that are truly effective refuges from the bulldozers (hence: why we need blockchains?)

What he's trying to say here is that big actors can act "too unilaterally" in the digital space, but small actors can "veto too much" in the real world. This is not true. Small actors cannot veto in the real world (or in the web2 digital world, for that matter), and I'd strongly suggest he reads Madison's Federalist 10 (where this is a major worry), but who am I kidding, these people think they just discovered sliced bread.

jmeister• 5 years ago

If you follow VB on Twitter or read his stuff, you will know he is pretty humble intellectually. He also collaborates with versatile social scientists like Weyl and Cowen.

Klein, being a prominent young pundit in DC, probably knows >100 tenured political science professors, who’d review his columns for free.

You think VB and EK don’t have their ideas or writings vetted by their scholarly friends?

credit_guy• 5 years ago

I like to think in terms of checks on the Executive power. It can go from virtually unchecked, or absolute monarchy (think Augustus of Rome, or Peter the Great of Russia), to virtual paralysis (think Poland before it was partitioned by Russia, Prussia and Austria). Checks on the Executive power are both good and bad. It's tricky to find the right balance.

mortenlarsen• 5 years ago

As an European this confuses me. In most of the world (AFAIK) "liberal" is basically the same as capitalist. So for example Trump is a liberal. Is this because the democrats and republicans switched platforms way back?

Here in Denmark the "No taxes" and "All power to cooperations" party is called "Liberal Alliance".

thristian• 5 years ago

There's (at least) two kinds of liberalism. "Economic liberalism" is basically capitalism, while "social liberalism" means things like gay marriage, trans rights, etc. There's also "economic conservatism" and "social conservatism".

In Europe, where societies have millennia-long traditions behind them, it wouldn't surprise me that "liberal" parties are both kinds of liberal, while "conservative" parties are both kinds of conservative.

On the other hand, the origin story of the USA involves both fleeing from religious persecution and economic rebellion; that is, extreme social conservatism and extreme economic liberalism. Thus, "conservative" Americans hold onto those values, and "liberal" Americans are left with the opposite: social liberalism and economic conservatism.

enragedcacti2• 5 years ago

In the United States the Overton window is shifted such that most mainstream politicians (except Bernie Sanders, AOC, and similar characters) are liberal in the European sense i.e. capitalist.

In our terminology, the republicans are "conservative" and democrats are "liberal" and those terms are used interchangeably with left/right in the mainstream.

US leftists (demsoc, socialists, communists, etc.) use the European definitions and hate on liberals/neolibs while most on the right use US terminology and would probably call socialists and communists "liberals".

didibus• 5 years ago

I feel it's not super effective to define the axis in terms of solutions, unless that is explicitly the objective of the angle, but for me I want a society where you are free to do whatever you want personally as long as it doesn't harm others (because I wouldn't want what others are doing to harm me in turn). And where each individual is maximally provided opportunity and wealth to enable them to do as much as they'd want and to meet all their needs.

Basically, I'd like to optimize for the most people to be happy, and have what they need and want, and to be able to express themselves and be who they are freely with the least amount of friction and effort required of each individual.

I think this is what defines my political position and my political goal, so what do you call that? I tend to feel progressives are the ones who share that same goal.

Things like self-authonomous zones, corporate run cities, immigration restrictions, etc. those all seem like mechanisms and solutions to try and build a system that optimize for some goal, but what goal is that?

For example, I think of conservatives as those who want to optimize for a return to religious practices, restricted social norms, not be free to do as you please or be who you are, but instead must choose between one of the roles pre-defined for your gender and appearance, etc. Optimize for inherited status, class seperation, and a pyramid of wealth/power.

Similarly I think of libertarian as those who want to optimize for winner take all, they want the most risk taking and luckiest to be rewarded with disproportionate wealth/status/benefits. Instead of optimizing for as even a distribution as possible in happiness and freedom, they'd rather optimize for skewed distributions instead.

I might have gotten some of those wrong, but my point is that I'd rather discuss goals when it comes to political axis, since I'm open to all approach that proves itself to best deliver on my goals.

a9h74j2• 5 years ago

I would suggest "levelers" as a label to apply on that axis, but then Wikipedia would need some disambiguation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levellers

1cvmask• 5 years ago

This is one of the better framings of differences to authoritarianism and liberty and acceptance of change that I have seen.

AnimalMuppet• 5 years ago

Completely apart from politics, my wife and I have noticed this as a difference between us. Her stubbornness takes the form "You can't stop me"; mine takes the form "You can't make me".

So far, our marriage is doing better than the country...

xg15• 5 years ago

I guess most people here are aware of it, but just in case someone overlooked (like I did), this essay was written by Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum. So, he's not exactly neutral on the bulldozer/vetocracy scale himself.

The bulldozer vs. vetocracy political axis

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