All The Books I Read In 2023

Some notes and quotes from the books I have read this year:

• Arbitrary Lines

  • Zoning is a relatively recent invention (~1920) and its purpose was to “prop up incumbent property values, slow the growth of cities, segregate the United States based on race and class, and enforce an urban ideal of detached single-family housing.”
  • Three ways zoning increases housing costs:
    • Blocking housing altogether, either by blocking new housing, prohibiting affordable housing or restraining density
    • By forcing housing that is built to be higher quality than residents might want through minimum lot sizes, minimum floor area requirements and minimum parking requirements
    • By adding extra layers of review to the permitting process that take time and money.
  • “Relatively little housing is being built, and where it is built at all, the housing is kept prohibitively expensive by unnecessary mandates and a costly permitting process.”
  • “In nearly every major US city, apartments are banned outright in at least 70 percent of residential areas. In suburbs, this share is often much higher, if apartments aren’t banned altogether.”
  • “While a developer has the incentives and local knowledge to make an educated guess at how much parking a particular project actually requires - if they supply too few spaces, they can’t lease or sell the units; if they build too many spaces, they lose money - minimum parking requirements supersede this judgement with arbitrary standards.”
  • “By forcing cities to sprawl out, writing automobile dependence into law, and pricing Americans out of our most temperate cities, zoning is such a slow motion environmental disaster and deserves to be recognized as such. If we are serious about preserving undeveloped land, reducing our fossil fuel dependence, and lowering greenhouse gas emissions, zoning has to go.”
  • “Few US cities price the social costs with lost open space, congestion, or new infrastructure correctly, giving a free pass to sprawl developers and residents to impose costs on the rest of society.”
  • “Standard zoning rules frequently force developers to build at least one or two parking spaces per residential unit. In this regard, zoning assumes that every resident owns a car, which may not be the case in many walkable or transit-accessible neighborhoods. And once a unit is built with a parking spot and the resident has already been forced to eat the cost, why not just buy a car?” After all, most zoning codes will also force any location they might travel to - from shops to offices to bars - to also provide off-street parking. This will usually come in the form of a massive surface lot, which has the added effect of reducing densities and making walking profoundly unpleasant. In this way, zoning simultaneously forces us to collectively subsidize driving while making walking, biking, and taking transit as uncomfortable as possible."
  • Some low hanging fruit changes that can be made to local zoning regulations:
    • End single-family zoning
    • End minimum parking requirements
    • Eliminate or lower minimum lot size and floor area regulations
  • “As long as we encourage Americans to think of their homes as an investment and allow every small suburb to incorporate and determine what can and can’t be built, zoning will always serve to perpetuate housing scarcity, stagnation, segregation and sprawl. We can’t tinker our way out of this one; the longer-term objective must be zoning abolition.”
  • “While zoning codes often ignore what a normal person might think of as negative externalities - such as noise, smells, smoke, or traffic - they are often packed to the gills with regulations to address ’externalities’ that simply don’t deserve regulatory deference.” Things like aesthetic changes and the “community-character” dog whistle.
  • “Given how technically and politically challenging it can be to overhaul an entire zoning code, zoning codes often stick around decades after their dictates have stopped being relevant.”
  • Houston has no zoning regulations but does have deed restrictions. These are “private, voluntary agreements among property owners - typically the homeowners of a particular sub-division or neighborhood - regulating how they can and cannot use their land. These are literally tied to the deed, meaning the property owner must agree to them as a condition of the sale.” Roughly 25% of the city has deed restrictions.
  • “The history of zoning referenda in Houston tells a clear story: when their deed restrictions were threatened, middle- and upper-income homeowners started agitating for zoning. Public enforcement of deed restrictions should thus be understood as a clever compromise that ultimately keeps the broader city free of the dead hand of zoning: by granting those pro-zoning minorities the opportunity to voluntarily opt in to the restrictive land-use regulations they desire within their immediate vicinity, Houston is able to protect the vast majority of the city from the types of arbitrary use distinctions, density limits, and raucous public hearings that cause so much harm in every other US city. That is to say, in exchange for respective pockets of private land-use regulation, Houston is able to grow, adapt and evolve like no other city.”
  • Without zoning things tend to sort themselves out naturally:
    • Industries need to be where land is cheap and transportation is accessible, and complaining neighbors are few and far between.
    • Large offices and commercial centers thrive on the visibility and access afforded by major corridors and transit interchanges.
    • Residential developments are content to fill up the quiet side streets in between, along with inoffensive retail - think corner stores and cafes.
  • “The ultimate lesson of land-use regulation in unzoned Houston is that, if a vocal minority of homeowners with unusually strong preferences for zoning are given what they want, they will leave the rest of the city alone. Once such groups are satiated with deed restrictions that perform roughly the same function - yet without doing all the damage of typical zoning code - it’s unclear that there will be any constituency for zoning left to raise a stink. And once zoning is out of the way, a lot of the other challenges facing cities become much easier to solve.”

• Cloudmoney

  • “The ability to chaperone payments not only entrenches the overall power of the banking sector, but also enables three further things. First, transaction surveillance: the money-passers can monitor your transactions to collect sensitive data about your daily life. Secondly, transaction censorship: they can block transactions they do not like, and, because you do not directly hold the money, can free and expropriate it. Thirdly, mass automation leads to further corporate power: remote digital corporations require remote digital money.”
  • “Conspirators” lobbying and influencing infrastructure against cash:
    • The banking sector - locks people into full dependence on the banking sector for all payments
    • The payment companies - they make fees from facilitating payments
    • The financial technology industry - cash does not gel well with automation
    • States and central banks - greater surveillance over a country’s economic activity and greater monetary control
  • “Banks do not ’lend state money’ to people who ask for loans. To return to the more accurate casino metaphor, they simply issue out digital chips to people who ask for loans, and in return extract loan agreements from them. In more technical terms, banks expand the short-term IOUs they issue as a way to build up a war chest of long-term future loan agreements that are worth more than the IOUs they issue to get them.”
  • “The basic principles of digital payment are straightforward: there are banks, messaging platforms between them, and messaging devices for us. From here you can understand most payment ‘innovations’, which normally entail building a layer on top of the same system or creating a new way to message the banks directly to bypass the card networks, or to augment those card networks. ApplePay and GooglePay, for example, are just new ways to send messages into the same old system, turning my phone into the equivalent of a card (with the side effect that Google now gets a new data stream of my payment activity).”
  • “But banks have begun to present ATMs as a helpful but outdated public service that they are encumbered with running. It is like a casino presenting the redemption of their chips as a charitable service they offer, rather than a legal requirement. Banks now present themselves like this while slowly closing down the cash infrastructure. This makes the chief competitor to their chips - cash - harder to access, which in turn makes cash seem less convenient, which in turn pushes more people towards their systems, an influx that is then used to justify closing down further cash infrastructure.”
  • “Partisans with an anti-cash agenda paint cash as an impediment - blocking the road for the fast cars seeking to overtake it. Yet there is no conflict in maintaining both systems. The closest transport analogy for cash is the bicycle, and going cashless is like closing down bike lanes that run parallel to roads in a city of cars.”
  • “Cash gives space for back-street, small-scale, family-run-business styles of capitalism. Corporations might battle each other for dominance, but they are allied in their desire to conquer that style. They want to swallow up mom-and-pop shops and consolidate them into a major branded chain, or to displace an informal street market with a supermarket listed on the stock exchange. Cash, in other words, appears resistant to both the ethos and future development of corporate capitalism.”
  • “Progressive social change is often marked by the legalisation of once criminal behaviours, examples of which include homosexuality, interracial relationships and - following Prohibition in the US - alcohol. Authorities attempted to cast drinking alcohol as a black-and-white case of ‘doing wrong’, and yet tens of millions of people continued to drink, suggesting that while they recognized its illegality, they did not see drinking as immoral. Rather, it was a ‘grey area’, and attempts to clamp down on grey areas have always resulted in driving them underground, where cash provides life support. Cannabis too relied on the cash economy while its advocates fought for its legalisation. Now that it paying off as the positive role it can play in many medical conditions is being recognized. But if cash were to be fully phased out, this type of life support could be severely curtailed. Zealous attempts to choke black markets have the effect of simultaneously choking routes for creative deviance in a society. In a world where a citizen’s every activity can be monitored via digital payments, the ability for law enforcement to locate and stamp out grey areas greatly increases.” Without cash grey area markets would not survive long enough to gain acceptance.
  • “Imagine a theocratic state blocking the ability to purchase alcohol, or an authoritarian state punishing political opponents by placing limits on their spending. If you think that sounds unlikely, these systems are already being piloted: for example, the Australian ‘cashless welfare card’ stops welfare recipients spending in non-approved stores for non-approved goods.”
  • “While some people may like apps and others not, the banks are going to push you onto them regardless, because they have a commercial imperative to do so. And in the same way as they have to change attitudes towards cash, so they have to find ways to wean non-compliant people off physical service. I have worked with user experience design teams in London who are given explicit briefs by banks to help them solve the ‘problem’ of older people who still expect this service.”
  • While digital finance might have had a major win during Covid, the commercial banks that provide the underlying digital money find themselves in a delicate position. Their pandemic success may have been too rapid, making central banks nervous. Central bankers know that if they push Cental Bank Digital Currency as a replacement they could destablise those very institutions. Central banks are not in the business of putting commercial banks out of business. If, however, they do not provide a form of ‘digital cash’, they risk creating public demand for dark-market alternatives like the stablecoins Tether provides."
  • “The desire to use cash is presented by the fintech industry as a stubborn refusal to move forward with the times, but I prefer to cast it as a stubborn refusal to go with the grain for corporate capitalism.”

• Internet for the People

  • “Those who suffer the most from a profit-driven system belong to communities that are too poor or too remote to merit the attention of the broadband monopolists. They are ignored because more money can be made elsewhere.”
  • “In an internet organized by the profit motive, not everyone can obtain the resources they need to freely choose the course of their own lives. Nor can everyone participate in the decisions that affect them. This isn’t just because most people aren’t executives and investors. At a deeper level, even the decisions of the decision-makers are delimited by an imperative nobody controls. The people can’t rule because, in a sense, nobody can.”
  • Community networks are being setup in places like Chattanooga. “It has also become one of the country’s most popular ISPs, by charging reasonable rates for some of the fastest residential speeds in the world. Moreover, it makes access a priority: low-income families are eligible for a special plan that gives them 100 megabit-per-second service for less than half the standard rate.” Publicly and cooperatively owned ‘community networks’ can supply better service at a lower cost than private ISPs.
  • “Hospitals and universities also tend to loom large in local economies. A 2021 study found they were the top employers in twenty-seven states. Sometimes these entities are public, sometimes private, but they all benefit from public money and tax breaks. What if, in exchange, they were required to purchase their internet access from community networks? Their subscription fees could help defray the costs of supplying households with free internet from the same fiber.”
  • “Embedding community networks in these kinds of arrangements would both buoy them financially and reinforce the democratic values that should define them, values that push against the inhuman power of the profit motive and towards the possibility of people ruling themselves together.”
  • Simply having more competition isn’t a solution. “Competition works best for customers who are worth competing for. Many people will remain ‘bad’ customers no matter how much competition exists, because they’re too poor, or they live in places too remote to be profitable.” “An ISP that faces competitive pressure is just as likely to spy on its customers’ browser history and sell that information to advertisers, for instance, or to violate net neutrality by creating premium ‘fast lanes’ for certain kinds of content. Indeed, competitive pressure may push firms to do these sorts of things more frequently, as they search for additional revenue to offset thinning profit margins.”
  • “Making markets more regulated or more competitive won’t touch the deeper problem, which is the market itself. The online malls are engineered for profit-making, and the profit-making is what makes them inequality machines. The exploitation of gig and ghost workers; the reinforcement of racism, sexism, and other oppressions; the amplification of right-wing propaganda - none of these diverse forms of social damage would exist if they weren’t profitable.”
  • Protocolizing and interoperability are possible solutions.
  • “The goal of deprivatization is not an internet with more competitive markets, but an internet where markets matter less. This is why, while working to disassemble the online malls, we must also be assembling a constellation of alternatives that can lay claim to the space they currently occupy. And these must be real alternatives, not smaller or more entrepreneurial versions of the tech giants but institutions of a fundamentally different kind, engineered to curtail the power of the profit motive and to enshrine the practices and principles of democratic decision-making. Some are already emerging in rudimentary form - self-governing social media communities, worker-owned app-based services - but they will need to be refined and expanded through public investment.”

• Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance

  • Electronic logging devices (ELDs) are mandated in all trucks in the US. These create a digital records of all activities with the intention of being able to better police safety rules.
  • “The ‘wiggle room’ around rules is a site for strategic negotiation, for economic functioning, for relationship management - for both good and ill. So when we decide to more strictly enforce rules using technology without accounting for what has been happening in the gap, we may well disrupt the social order of a particular context in unforeseen ways.”
  • “Technology often fails as a solution because the problems it’s intended to solve aren’t, at their core, technology problems - they’re social, economic, and cultural problems, and they require solutions in the same register.”
  • “The ‘race to the bottom’ engendered by deregulation took its toll on drivers not only economically, but in terms of the conditions under which they did their day-to-day work. Overwork and cost cutting wreaked havoc on drivers’ physical and mental health and wellbeing - leading transport economist Michael Belzer to compare post-deregulation trucking workplaces to ‘sweatshops on wheels’.”
  • “Rather than significantly raising wages or improving working conditions to improve driver retention, the industry has responded by lobbying for the removal of what they see as burdensome safety regulations, and by recruiting new demographics of workers into trucking.” There isn’t a labor shortage, there is a better pay and conditions shortage.
  • “It is widely acknowledged that truckers lie on their logbooks. They do so routinely - so much that they are often dismissively referred to as ‘comic books,’ ‘coloring books,’ or ‘swindle sheets.’ Recall that these documents are used for regulatory and compliance purposes, but typically not for driver compensation; thus, adjusting a log doesn’t have a detrimental financial effect for a driver, and much more likely frees him up to make more money.”
  • “The problem’s roots are economic - to make a living, truckers have little choice but to break the law and to put themselves, and the motoring public, in danger. … Rather than change the underlying conditions that give rise to lawbreaking, regulators and companies have tried to make it more difficult for truckers to falsify their time records. They have done this by mandating the use of digital devices, integrated into trucks themselves, that create a record of the hours the truck is driven.”
  • “A driver using paper logs, faced with a full truck stop, might hunt for parking at the next stop even while officially off duty. But because the ELD automatically detects a truck’s movement, doing this might thrust a digitally monitored driver from being off duty to being on the clock again - potentially putting him in violation of the rules. A digitally monitored trucker thus has much less flexibility about when he can stop for the night.”
  • “Many truckers agreed that they were under time pressure in their work, and that they often didn’t get enough rest to drive safely. But focusing on truckers’ log fudging treated a symptom of the problem, not its root cause. Truckers weren’t tired because they were able to falsify their logbooks; they were tired because the industry was set up in ways that necessitated them breaking rules. By focusing on what truckers were doing to react to that system, the ELD mandate viewed them - the least powerful members of the industry - as untrustworthy liars who needed to be better policed, rather than professionals doing their best to negotiate difficult logistics in the face of countervailing demands.”
  • “It’s that unacknowledged, unaccounted-for work time that truckers say, is the real driver of fatigue in the industry! Truckers pointed overwhelmingly to a chief example: what is known in the industry as ‘detention time.’ When truckers arrive at a shipper’s or receiver’s terminal, they don’t immediately drive up to be loaded or unloaded. Instead, they often face very long (and unpredictable) delays while they wait for a dock and personnel to become available.”
  • “Detention time causes significant problems for hours-of-service compliance, as a driver facing a long delay may run out of available hours to drive to his next destination.”
  • “But crucially, the study did not find that the rollout of electronic monitoring led to any improvement in the safety outcomes we actually care about. Truck crashes didn’t decrease after the mandate began to be enforced - and for small carriers, they actually increased. The number of fatalities in large truck crashes hit a thirty-year high in the first year of the ELD mandate, even as general vehicles fatalities decreased.”
  • “Imagine you are told you have about ten hours to complete a six-hundred-mile trip to see your grandmother. But you know that if it actually takes you ten-and-a-half or even eleven hours, no great negative consequence will befall you …. Now imagine that you have to make this same trip, but your grandmother has told you she’ll write you out of your will if you don’t arrive within ten hours exactly. How do you feel? How do you drive? Do you take time to stretch, or get a cup of coffee, or go a little slower through an icy patch?”
  • “Information technologies can attenuate this connection between work tasks and embodied knowledge - by breaking up work processes into discrete, rationalized, lower-skill tasks; by decontextualizing knowledge from the physical site of labor to centralized, abstract databases; or by converting work practices into ostensibly objective, calculable, neutral records of human action. In these ways, information technologies legitimate some forms of knowledge while rendering others less valuable, to potentially detrimental effect on worker power.”
  • “Not only do these capabilities replace road knowledge and self-knowledge, but they introduce a new form of valuable information - aggregation and comparison of information about multiple drivers, gleaned from afar. A driver may state that a road is currently impassable due to weather conditions, an assertion that would previously have been difficult to challenge - but using aggregated data, his dispatcher may responded that ‘I know the weather is not too bad for you to continue driving down I-80 because I see that I have four other trucks on that road now.’”
  • Some ways to resist being monitored or get around rules:
    • Ghost logs - Log in to the ELD using another username/password when you reach your limits. There are often demo and dummy accounts.
    • Mis-logging non-driving work - Loading/unloading time is manually entered by drivers. You can log it as off-duty rest time to preserve work hours.
    • Rolling to stops - “In one of my observations at a trucking firm, a driver had very little time remaining on his fourteen-hour duty and eleven-hour driving clock, yet was still a few miles from his pickup point. The dispatcher instructed the driver to park the truck at a Walmart he was approaching and to record himself as being off duty on his ELD…. At that point, the driver was legally required to take a ten-hour rest break in order to gain more work time. But the dispatcher instead instructed the driver to ‘roll’ the remaining handful of miles to the pickup point, at a speed of less than fifteen miles per hour, in order to avoid triggering the ELD from registering the truck as ‘driving.’”
    • Some companies selling ELDs market themselves as companies that only track what is legally required for compliance and nothing more.
    • Quitting - Many older drivers just quit instead of having to be constantly monitored. This is bad from a safety perspective since it means there will be more newer drivers and they are more likely to cause crashes.
    • Collaborative omission - When a law enforcement officer inspects a driver’s time logs they ask for documents to verify their recent whereabouts. Some truck stops stopped including the time on receipts, they just had the location and date. The lack of time gives the truckers more leeway to fudge things.
  • “Some industry insiders believe that it’s only a matter of time before trucker wearables and driver-facing camera systems become standard - or even legally required, following the path of the ELD before them.” Things like detecting if the driver’s eyes close or look away from the road for too long and sounding an alarm and sending a video to his boss.
  • “A naive reading of the situation might suggest that automation obviates the need for surveillance. But recall that even the most sophisticated autonomous vehicle systems on the market today require humans to maintain attention and be at the ready to step in. And recall that humans are extremely bad at maintaining such attention - and will look for creative ways around doing so. So how do we impel humans to fulfill their roles? By monitoring them, and nagging them, and imposing legal liability on them if they fail. Despite marketing rhetoric of humans kicked back and napping while their cars autonomously zip them around town, the consumer market for autonomous vehicles is rife with surveillance.”
  • “The problem in trucking is that drivers are incentivized to work themselves well beyond healthy limits - sometimes to death. The ELD doesn’t solve this problem, or even attempt to do so. It doesn’t change the fundamentals of the industry - its pay structure, its uncompensated time, its danger, its lack of worker protections. At best, it prevents some of the very worst-of-the-worst carriers from pushing drivers too far - but as we have seen, it remains both possible (and sometimes encouraged) for drivers to exploit the limitations of electronic monitoring.”

• Health Communism

  • “Those who are deemed to be surplus are rendered excess by the systems of capitalist production and have been consequently framed as a drain or burden on society. But the surplus population has become an essential component of capitalist society, with many industries built on the maintenance, supervision, surveillance, policing, data extraction, confinement, study, cure, measurement, treatment, extermination, housing, transportation, and care of the surplus. In this way, those who are discarded as non-valuable life are maintained as a source of extraction and profit for capital.”
  • “Marta Russell’s money model of disability theorizes that while the disabled - the surplus population - are widely regarded as a ‘drain’ on the economy, in truth over time capital and the state have constructed systems to reclaim this lost population as a source of financial production. Russell situates these systems as a source of financial production. Russell situates these systems as manifesting through charity fundraisers, the prioritization of care aimed toward the ‘repair’ of disabled people to become workers, and through policies that grow the private sector through for-profit private nursing home care paid for by publicly funded, means-test ed state health care programs.”
  • “To support her model, Russell pointed to how nursing home residents are counted as assets in Wall Street evaluations of nursing home corporations, which are assigned a valuation in anticipated annual revenue per person … The economic regime of warehoused care exploits not only the labor of those who provide care, it exploits the bodies of those who need care, transforming them from people into commodities.”
  • “Rather than support disabled people directly in their homes and their communities, welfare systems have been designed as mechanisms for public money to pass into private companies seeking to apply economies of scale and generate revenue from mass market care.”
  • “Public money guarantees a fixed amount per body, leaving public and private entities (long-term care and nursing home corporations, prisons and jails) to find or create the opportunity for growth and revenue. This totality of motivations and relations, defining the intersection and incorporation of health with capital, is what we have elected to call extractive abandonment. In a political economy built on systems of extractive abandonment, the state exists to facilitate a capacity for profit, balanced always against the amount of extractable capital or health of the individual subject.”
  • “The political economy demands that we maintain our health to make our labor power fully available, lest we be marked and doomed as surplus. The surplus is then turned into raw fuel to extract profits, through rehabilitation, medicalization, and the financialization of health. This has not only justified organized state abandonment and enforced the poverty of the poor, sick, elderly, working class, and disabled; it has tied the fundamental idea of the safety and survival of humanity to exploitation.”
  • “What has been demonstrated in innumerable circumstances - and certainly in the privatization efforts in Latin America in recent decades - is that state spending either remains the same or increases when accounting for both public spending on health services and public funding to subsidize private healthcare markets. In fact, in countries that have recently moved from primarily public health systems to some mixture of public and private health services, the quality and availability of healthcare for poor, disabled, elder, and other surplus populations is often substantially lower.”
  • “This is likely the direct result of the basic fact that private health insurance companies operate on the explicit debt/eugenic-burden model: their aim is to insure as many biologically or behaviorally ’low-risk’ individuals as they can, from which they draw premiums as operating revenue, and as few ‘high-risk’ individuals as possible, to stem potential losses. … There is a perverse and obvious incentive for private insurance companies to push people with more expensive care, or less ability to pay, into public safety net programs”

• The Promise of Access

• Capital City Gentrification and the Real Estate State

  • The property contradiction: “the unhappy tension between capitalists’ desire for certain types of planning interventions and their antipathy toward anything that restricts their operations. The need government to undertake certain functions to secure both their own profitability and their workers’ survival.” “They know their land would be useless without planners, but they reject planning as such as an expression of government overreach.”
  • The capitalist-democracy contradiction: “In a nominally democratic capitalist republic, the state and its planners have to perform a delicate balancing act: planners must proceed with enough openness and transparency to maintain public legitimacy, while ensuring that capital retains ultimate control over the processes’ parameters. The people must have their say, but their opinions must be limited.”
  • “Planners managing the capitalist-democracy contradiction are facing planning commissions and review boards comprised almost entirely of people whose future are tied to real estate.” This is the real estate state, a government by developers, for developers.
  • “In the real estate state, planners can create marvelous environments for rich people, but if they work to improve poor peoples’ spaces they risk sparking gentrification and displacement. Rich communities can lobby for all sorts of planning improvements, but many poor neighborhoods fight planning interventions they would otherwise embrace out of a very real fear that any enhancements will trigger displacement.”
  • “Early gentrification was a boon to politicians who were both hamstrung by shrinking municipal budgets and unwilling to take on serious problems of entrenched poverty and structural racism. To their relief, the face of early gentrification was a group of middle class, mostly White liberals looking to add value to the city’s building stock - just the kind of constituents they were seeking to cultivate. In many cities, these newcomers took over neighborhood associations, asserted their power within party clubs, and steered the work of local governance and planning bodies that had recently been created in response to the urban civil rights struggles of the 1960s. In doing so , they exerted power far disproportionate to their actual numbers.”
  • “Urban police forces act as the armed wing of the real estate state: what planners and policy makers enact, police enforce. Planning and police departments are separate entities, with separate leadership, budgets and institutional cultures. Their missions are nevertheless often aligned around protecting property and encouraging gentrification. Rising real estate values are a crucial performance metric for many urban police departments, who point to gentrification as proof that their ballooning budgets represent money well spent.”
  • “By choice or by force, planners use gentrification to create physical environments for capital to thrive. It is the process by which cities seek capital, and capital seeks land. Its endgame is a city controlled by bankers and developers, run like a corporation, designed as a luxury product and planned by the finance sector. What was public becomes private; what was common becomes enclosed; what was cheap becomes expensive; what was shared becomes traded. Through the real estate state, teh city becomes gentrified. Through gentrification, the city becomes neoliberal.”
  • Unmaking the real estate state:
    • Take the strategies imposed on poor neighborhoods (ex. inclusionary upzoning) and force then on the rich instead, and do the opposite as well
    • Disincentivizing evictions and decommodifying land. It should be city policy to protect tenants’ right to stay put over landlords’ right to extract rents
    • When property owners fail to pay taxes, cities can stop selling liens to speculators and instead transfer them into a community land trust
    • “Right to sell” bills that give households at risk of foreclosure the opportunity to sell their home to the city, which would operate it as public housing
    • “Right of first refusal” on home sales. Give the city the chance to buy any property for sale at market value and convert it to social housing.
    • A “luxury fee” charged to buyers of properties worth far more than the median rate, making them less valuable to speculators and less likely to be produced
    • Tax any increased revenue landlords derive from public initiatives - these are socially produced and should not be anyone’s to own
  • “We can and should be mad at planners, but ultimately they cannot undo real estate’s grasp over the city until people wrest back power from those who profit off land.”

• The Chaos Machine

• 24/7 Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

• Capital Is Dead

• Crisis in Canada’s Policing

  • “A famous experiment took place in Kansas City in the early 1970s. Five different beats in the city were each divided into three areas. In one area, routine patrol ceased and officers only responded to calls for service. In a second area, routine patrol continued at its normal rate. In a third, routine patrol was doubled or tripled. At the end of the experimental period it was found that the strength of the patrol did not affect crime rates, arrest rates or the public’s fear of crime.”
  • “Many effective methods of crime prevention occur outside police work. Auto theft, for instance, has fallen by eighty per cent in the last few decades, almost entirely because vehicle manufacturers have install better locking systems for both ignition and vehicle parts. Insurance companies have imposed standards for house and apartment safety, which has helped to modify the number of break-ins. Safe drug injections sites, almost always opposed by police when first established, have helped reduce crime associated with drugs…. The substantial increase to the Child Benefit allowance in 2016 has been very effective in reducing crime, as has the provision of affordable housing.”
  • “The design of urban space has a significant influence on criminal activity. Active streets bustling with people and traffic are much safer than empty streets. Designing streets with a variety of uses and reasonably high density is always a better option…. An apartment building with seven or eight apartments on each floor is much safer than one with fifteen or twenty apartments for the simple reason that fewer doors means residents have a better chance of knowing who belongs on that floor and who does not, giving them better control over the places they live.”
  • “Data shows that good social programs, particularly those directed at young mothers and their children, are far away the most important tools for preventing crime.”
  • “Two studies have found that at least forty per cent of police officers’ families experience domestic violence, in contrast to ten per cent of families in the general population.”
  • “Police forces in Canada see the officer’s role as that of a generalist. The idea that generalists should fill all positions seems unique to police organizations; it is not found in schools, hospitals, governments, factories or law firms. Rather than retaining specialists to deal with youth or intimate partner violence, for instance, police forces assign officers to these duties and give them special training to do the job. Officers rotate through special squads, moving on to something else every few years as new officers are brought in and trained.”
  • “In another example of police having privileges that ew other workers could even imagine, and hampering all discipline outcomes, is the fact that, except in Alberta, officers can be suspended only on condition that they continue to be fully paid. They can be demoted for a short period, or lose pay for a few days or a few weeks, but they cannot be suspended without pay unless they are jailed. … In 2020, it was discovered by the media that a Toronto officer who had been suspended twelve years earlier remained fully paid as the case was delayed and then appealed. … In similar cases in the past, officers who have been suspended with pay for several years resign just before a final determination of their disciplinary case, thus taking the money and running.”
  • An idea is to require officers to have liability insurance “When they are sued, the insurance kicks in and, if they are found liable, the insurer pays, not the public. As well, officers who perform in ways that make them subject to lawsuits because of their actions will find it either difficult to obtain insurance or will find the insurance more costly. Requiring liability insurance is a good way to insure that officers are accountable for their activities.”
  • “Understanding the circumstances that lead to a crime being committed - whether a ’lapse in judgement’ or poverty or mental illness, for instance - and not demonizing people makes good sense. The police could perhaps give the same consideration they offer their colleagues to members of the public.”
  • “A new approach is also needed to staffing. THe recruit system, where every new employee (save for former police officers) starts at the bottom, is a waste of talent and money. It also denies the police force the agents of change that are important for the performance of any large organization. Police should adopt the general staffing policies used by other large organizations: Make a job description of the position that needs to be filled, post that description both inside and outside the police force, sort the candidates in terms of qualifications and experience, interview those who seem most qualified and skilled, then hire the best candidate.” This is standard practice for hiring detectives in the UK
  • “Once policies are put in place to take guns out of the hands of rank and file officers, police training will change in a fundamental way, since officers will not be required to learn about the use of guns unless they wish to be members of an emergency task force. Instead, that time can be spent learning about exercise o discretion and negotiation and de-escalation techniques.”

• The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market

  • “Opponents of workmen’s compensation and child labor regulation repeatedly insistent that restrictions on business practices threatened American freedom, ignoring the fact that other industrialized nations had done more to protect citizens and that their economies worked as well as, if not better than, the American economy did. They had remained democracies. Their people were still free. The claim that restraining capitalism to protect workers threatened freedom was bogus, but the men advocating it had more money, power, and social position to deploy to propagate their views than their adversaries did. And so their arguments began to take hold.”
  • On the 1920s propaganda campaign of the National Electric Light Association: “The FTS found that industry actors had attempted to control the entire American educational system - from grade school to university - in their own economic interest. The effort focused on the social sciences - economics, law, political science, and government - but also included engineering and business. Its purpose was to ensure ‘straight economic thinking’ - by which NELA meant capitalistic, free-market principles - and to supply young people and their teachers with ‘correct information.’ The goal was to mold the minds of the current generation and those to come.”
  • “The NELA academic program had three major elements: First, recruiting experts to produce competing studies and offer alternative ‘facts’ about the relative costs of private and public electricity generation. Second, rewriting textbooks to support the private electricity industry - including denying corruption charges and promulgating an ethical, trustworthy image - coupled with pressure on publishers to modify or withdraw textbooks that NELA found objectionable. And third, revising civics, economics, and business curricula in high schools, colleges, and universities - and establishing new programs, including at emerging business schools - designed to extol the benefits of laissez-faire capitalism.”
  • NELA enlisted academics to put out studies showing that the public Ontario Hydro-Electric Power was more expensive. One report claimed it had been vetted by the engineering department at Ontario Hydro-Electric Power, but the chairman said “Not only are the figures published in Stewart’s report incorrect in many instances, but the statements throughout the report are not in accordance with the facts.” Nevertheless, this was then citied as proof that private electricity was cheaper. “Nearly all independent observers affirmed that the Ontario Hydro-Electric Power Commission reached most province residents at a lower price than their US counterparts.”
  • “These NELA studies played a major role in public debate. Americans heard that academics had proved that public utilities could not generate electricity at lower cost than the private sector. It would be years before they learned these studies had been commissioned by the electricity industry and that their authors had been told what they needed to say.”
  • “The NELA propaganda campaign foreshadowed later efforts by the tobacco industry to fight the facts about their products and influence scientific researchers and educators to promote their point of view. Like Big Tobacco, the electricity industry organized ostensibly independent conferences that weren’t, recruited academic researchers to lend credibility to misleading arguments, and funded favorable research. There was one major difference, though: the electricity industry had a good product. Used as intended, electricity did not kill people; it made their lives better. But the industry failed to make it widely available to people who needed and wanted it, and in that sense had failed the American people. Like the tobacco industry, the electricity industry denied its failures, promoted disinformation, and, when confronted with adverse evidence, tried to change the subject to freedom.”
  • “The NELA campaign not only falsely claimed that private sector electricity was cheaper and more efficient than public sector electricity, it build on arguments made in the debates over child labor and workmen’s compensation that government involvement in the marketplace was an un-American infringement on freedom. In doing so, it helped construct a key plank in the platform of American market fundamentalism and a key factor in the big myth of the Free Market: that the American way of life was inextricably linked to free-market capitalism, and that government engagement in the marketplace threatened that way of life. Perhaps most importantly, NELA pioneered a strategy of insisting that these claims were true, regardless of the facts.”
  • Business leaders in the US bankrolled Austrian economists like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek as they moved to the US and promoted a propagandized version of their work.
  • “Hayek is not a heartless absolutist. The Road to Serfdom is not a brief against governance. It is a cautionary tale about the limits of information and the judiciousness that should follow from recognizing those limits. It is an argument against central economic planning, and against dirigisme of any kind, but it is not the book that many of its partisans seem to think it is. … The fact is that the nuanced Hayek of The Road to Serfdom was not (for the most part) the Hayek who reached the American people. In the hands of ideologues, The Road to Serfdom was transmogrified from a complex and subtle argument about the risks of governmental control into an antigovernment polemic. That transmogrification began with the book’s promotion in America by Henry Hazlitt and the National Association of Manufacturers.”
  • In 1945 Reader’s Digest published a twenty-page condensation of The Road to Serfdom. It’s focus was not on socialism or communism as conventionally understood, but on Nazi German. “the Digest version of the text is primarily an account of the horrors of totalitarianism, with Nazi Germany as the prime example. … The right-wing totalitarianism against which Americans were still fighting in the spring of 1945 is equated with left-wing socialism, which is in turn equated with central planning. Even though socialists (and communists) were prominent among the victims of fascism and in the resistance to it, National Socialism must be socialism according to the Digest. (The Nazis’ use of the term flummoxed people then as it does now.) Nazism (they argued) could not be viewed as the distinctive pathology that happens to share the same word as part of its name, but as a characteristic of all forms of socialism.”
  • “What the business community promoted was a flattened and propagandistic version of Hayek, in which his recognition of the realms of legitimate government action was made to disappear.”
  • “The deification of The Market involved a key stop of illogic: viewing markets (or The Market) as autonomous, existing unto themselves, rather than as something created, sustained, and above all ruled by people, who might make conscious choices as to how they wanted those markets to operate, might nudge or adjust them when they were working well overall and fix them when they failed, and use government as the instrument to do that. … to accept the pejorative language of government ‘interference’ - as opposed to the neutral language of ‘action’ - is to endorse the zero-sum relationship between state and market that became prominent in the 1970s.”
  • “Patrons seek out groups and individuals with congenial views and strengthen them with moral, logistical, and financial support. They fund things that interest them, and so ideas that suit the rich are more likely to thrive than those that suit the poor. In this way, patronage by exceptionally wealthy individuals or organizations may act as a kind of unnatural selection, ensuring the ideas they select come to the forefront of cultural conversation, regardless of their actual fitness to explain the world. And it was this process - not survival of the fittest, but selection by the richest - that helped to ensure that neoliberalism would be expressed in America primarily as market fundamentalism.”
  • Rose Wilder Lane is considered one of the early influential libertarians. She is the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House on the Prairie book series.
  • “In reality most homesteaders failed, despite a good deal of government support. But Rose and Laura preferred to have her readers believe that the hardships had paid off, both financially and morally. The frontier, in this telling, built character, and character build America. The realities - expensive, brutal, and often bloody failures of frontier settlement, not to mention the genocide of Indigenous people - were not a part of the story that Wilder and Lane wanted to tell. They would not let facts get in the way of a good story.”
  • In 1947 and 1948 Lane collaborated with J. Howard Pew and Herbert Hoover to ban an economics textbook by Keynesian economist and Stanford professor Lore Tarshis. The campaign effectively stopped sales of the textbook and had a lasting legacy on how economics textbooks were written. Paul Samuelson had a textbook come out a year later and wrote it in a “more technical, scientific, and defensible voice - ‘as if a lawyer were at my elbow’”
  • “Some might argue that the libertarianism of the Little House books was more unconscious than intentional, and that the basic stories were true - that Rose simply influenced how the details were fleshed out. But the stories were not true, not in the details and not in their overall framework. In the Ingalls’ real lives, hard work didn’t bring success. Nor were they rugged individuals: they relied on neighbors and community for their very survival, and their presence on the frontier was predicated on the federal government’s removal of native Osage peoples and distribution of their land to white settlers. Yet in the books, the state scarcely appears, save in a negative light. Conspicuously, it fails to do the one thing Lane believed it should: perform police function and protect white settlers.”
  • “During the 1940s and ’50s, libertarian movie makers and their allies in business deployed censorship, intimidation, and overt propaganda to change the tone of America’s screens and disseminate the myth of the free market. … Pre-World War II mainstream American films had often been sympathetic to working-class interests.”
  • General Electric Theater was a popular show from 1953-1962 that was sponsored by General Electric and helped launch the political career of Ronald Reagan, who was the host of the show. It served as propaganda for the free-market ideology. “While some episodes were simply dramas, comedies or holiday specials, many had messages extolling the virtues of free-market capitalism and individualism. Stories embedded themes about the centrality of hard work, individual achievement, and self-reliance. Get-rich quick schemes typically came to naught, but hard work and perseverance paid off. Men who relied on others to solve their problems failed; men who took responsibility for their choices succeeded.”
  • “Hayek worried that opportunistic businessmen would embrace his message of government reticence but in tht next breath demand ’that the government protect their industry from foreign competition.’ History of NAM certainly validated that concern.”
  • “In 1948, Luhnow met personally with University of Chicago chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins and offered fifteen thousand dollars per year for ten years to cover Hayek’s salary; evidently that did the trick. Hayek was appointed in 1950, although not as a professor of economics, since the department would not have him. Instead he joined the faculty as a professor in teh Committee on Social Thought, with his salary paid by Harold Luhnow. … It was highly irregular for a private individual to pay for a particular professor’s salary. Moreover, Luhnow did not simply provide the money; he had structured and shaped the project.”
  • “In promoting Austrian economics in America, Luhnow and his associates aspired to use the discipline to promote an economic vision that feted teh successes of capitalism and downplayed, even denied, its failures. Alongside this was a political vision introducing a new element into the big myth of market fundamentalism: economic freedom was now not merely one leg of a tripod, but the flagpole on which the flag of freedom flew. Put another way, their ambition was for Americans to understand freedom in singularly economic terms.”
  • In the 1950s George Stigler took on the task of producing an edited version of Adam’s Smith The Wealth of Nations. The original text from 1776 was over one thousand pages. “Conspicuous among the topics elided (or omitted entirely) are Smith’s arguments for the necessity of regulation when self-interest fails, and the necessity of raising funds for public goods that the markets by themselves either do not provide or cannot sustain. … Smith advocated open trade and competition, but he also acknowledged the need for restraints on the marketplace to protect public safety. He also identified the problem of wages that were sometimes inadequate, and the necessity of taxation to pay for public goods such as education and infrastructure. That Adam Smith so nowhere to be found in Stigler’s Chicago version.”
  • “Smith - the hero of libertarians, the father of free-market economics, the patron saint of self-interest - spent a significant section of his most famous work discussing banks and banking precisely because it illustrated an essential and non negligible point: that regulations do infringe liberty, but they are necessary when ’natural liberty of a few individuals … endangers the security of the whole society.’ The image of Smith as someone who insists on the comprehensive self-sufficiency and self-correcting character of markets, and the adequacy of self-interest and the profit motive in driving productive behavior, is simply incorrect…. What does Stigler do with Smith’s long, detailed, and thoughtful analysis of the need for banking regulation? Nothing. Smith’s discussion of the problems of late eighteenth-century banking and the need for banking regulation is entirely omitted from Stigler’s version of the volume.”
  • Smith “recognized that the market alone would not attend to all of society’s needs, and he provided well-reasoned frameworks for economic regulation and taxation. That Smith is missing from Stigler’s volume.
  • On how Milton Friedman rose to prominence despite being considered a radical, whose book Capital and Freedom got widely negative reviews. “In the 1960s, most Americans still had a lot of faith in the capacity of government to address ills and even achieve great things, like the righting of the wrongs of segregation and putting astronauts in space. But by the 1980s, after the traumas of Watergate, urban riots, American’s humiliation in Vietnam, stagflation, and teh Arab oil embargo, to many Americans things were looking a bit grim. With the Great Depression in the rear view mirror and most of the architects of the New Deal dead and gone, it was perhaps easy to forget the lessons of the 1930s. And the Chicago school, of course, was determined to deny - or at least reinterpret - those lessons. … Business leaders were happy to be told they need worry about nothing other than making profits; white people to be told that discrimination was someone else’s problem; and industrialists that pollution was just a trifling ’neighborhood’ effect. Whether his motivations were cynical or sincere, Milton Friedman served his audience’s interests well. He was saying what many powerful people wanted to hear.”
  • “As president, Reagan would promote the interests and ideology of some of the most powerful people in America. He would ingeniously sustain the impression that the rich and powerful were somehow victims of an unfair system, he would work to reverse more than half a century of progress for ordinary people, and he would do it all in the name of ‘freedom’.”
  • “Supply-side economics was a shell game. The theory had been tested and failed. In a rational world, this should have discredited the idea and the economists who preached it. Instead, conservatives doubled down. Since the 1980s, the centrality of tax cuts has been the single most consistent theme in the Republican Party catechism.”
  • “In 1973, with CIA support, the Chilean military overthrew democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende and installed a brutal, violent dictatorship. The United States backed the dictatorship, as did Milton Friedman, on the grounds that its market-friendly policies would enhance freedom; a group of economists influenced by the Chicago school and was nicknamed the ‘Chicago Boys’ served as consultants for the regime. But Chileans under General Augusto Pinochet were not free; they were terrorized. Taiwan and Singapore were also following market-forward policies of which the administration approved, but they were not democracies either. Meanwhile, Japan had used export-led industrial policies to achieve high growth rates; the visible hand of government policy had played a significant role in its postwar success.” Reagan cited Japan and Korea as examples of the magic of the marketplace, but their successes were heavily government-led.
  • “Corporate conservatives had long insisted that what they wanted was competition, but the telecom and airline experiences belied that claim; what corporate America wanted was to control their business practices with little federal constraint, and, if possible, to control their markets, too. Consumer advocates were not arguing for centralized planning - they wanted genuine competition - but they received no support from corporate-funded think tanks.”
  • “Right- and lef-wing media may be balanced in their opposing political directions, but they are anything but equal in magnitude and reach: overtly left-wing television stations are much less abundant than overtly right-win ones. This should come as little surprise: corporate America tends to be either centrist, right-leaning, or overtly right-wing, and it is corporate America that has been able to develop media conglomerates. There aren’t many communists in America, and so far as the evidence goes, none owns a radio station, much less hundreds of them.”
  • History suggests “developing countries’ performance was generally better when their development was state-led, and worse when they undertook market-oriented reform. Free-trade agreements typically redistribute wealth (even while their advocates decry redistribution achieved through other means). They also impose on developing nations terms that rich nations did not follow in their own histories. Often these terms hurt poor countries by making it hard or even impossible for them to protect infant industries and nurture home-grown innovation. Thus, in a latter-day version of colonialism, they become permanent provisioners of raw materials for wealthier countries.”
  • “The fundamental requirement of science is that theories be tested by evidence and modified in accordance with the results, but many neoliberal or market fundamentalists assertions have either never been properly tested, have yielded ambiguous results, of have been tested and failed. Yet, their advocates cling to them.”
  • “When synthetic opioids came on the market, they were falsely sold by their manufacturers as unlikely to cause addiction. A weak (ad arguably captured) federal agency, the US Food and Drug Administration, declined to control them the way it controls morphine, heroin, and other highly addictive drugs, allowing manufacturers to market aggressively, particularly in regions of the country were disability from workplace injury was known to be high. In Europe, where these drugs are better regulated - and there is generally greater state support for injured or addicted individuals - there is no opioid crisis.”
  • “Study after study has shown that people are happiest not when they are most ‘free’ - however that might be assessed - but when they live in societies with strong social safety nets and robust family and community ties. Typically that means living in a country with good health provision, with protections to buffer unemployment, and where work is not so all-consuming as to leave inadequate time for family and friends. Money plays a role - wealthy people tend to be happier than poor people - but a smaller one than many Americans assume.”
  • “Conservatives decry ’throwing money’ at problems, yet decade after decade both Democratic and Republican presidents have thrown money at the military with unclear return. One result of this enormous military spending is that Americans get far less bang for our buck in government spending than people in other countries do. Perhaps this is why so many of us accept the argument that government is inefficient: much of our tax dollar is wasted, not on ‘wasteful’ social programs, but on wasteful militarism.”
  • “Regulations don’t just protect us; in many cases they enable us to do things we could not otherwise do. The same is true of taxes. Regulations and taxes are tools to make out economic system work better, treat people fairly, and permit them to live with dignity, while protecting the natural world on which we all depend on for our health, our well-being, and ultimately our survival.”

• Pegasus How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy

• Levers of Power:How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It

  • Businesses hoard cash as a bargaining chip to get political favors. “Business used capital strikes, and the threat of even deeper strikes, to scuttle or weaken progressive reform, and to get the administration to pursue pro-business initiatives like free-trade agreements and deregulation.”
  • “Our central argument in this regard is that mass resistance is most effective when it directly targets corporations and state agencies. By threatening the profits or the functioning of those institutions, popular disruption can compel their leaders to accept progressive changes in government policy. Since these elites are usually the key roadblocks to change, and since they possess, enormous power over what the government does, it makes sense to target them than to focus on elected politicians. Their responsiveness to a movement demands doesn’t spring from their goodwill, but from a rational cost-benefit analysis of their interests. If subjected to mass pressures that disrupt their profit-making or their institutional functioning, these leaders will naturally seek to cut their losses. Conceding to movement demands often becomes the lesser-evil option. If movements can force a change in these elites’ cost-benefit calculations, progressive government action then becomes much more likely.”
  • “Social movements are most successful when they can find ways to exploit these tensions within the ruling class, by unleashing disruption that targets the right pressure points. Getting some elites to intervene on behalf of the movement does not mean that organizers need to politely request their help - indeed, that approach is usually a dismal failure. Confrontation and disruption are more likely to ‘pull around’ elites, who then intervene to stop the disruption by urging other corporate and state elites to concede to the movement. Disruption can take diverse forms, from workers shutting down a workplace to lawsuits. Different categories of elites may be susceptible to different forms of movement pressures”
  • US corporate elites in the 1930s and 2000s were both forced to accept some amount of reform, but the elites of the 1930s faced far more pressure so the reforms of the 1930s were far more robust.
  • “Strong reform bills require disruptive and sustained mass action that threatens the elite institutions that wield power over the policy process.”
  • “Since the hoarders held the investment capital needed to jump-start the economy, recovery depended on their goodwill. The administration hoped that scrapping life-saving regulations would cajole them into investing again. Again, it was reaffirming the corporate-friendly version of cost-benefit logic: some minor costs to polluters were deemed more important than thousands of annual fatalities and millions of dollars of costs to the public.”
  • On the EPA’s tightening of fuel efficiency standards. “The new standards did ‘mandate an average fuel economy of 54.5 miles per gallon for the 2025 model year’ for cars and light trucks, but only after ’lengthy negotiations’ with the ‘Big Three” US automakers (Ford, General Motors, Chrysler) and other industry leaders. The negotiations sought to maintain or enhance the automakers’ profit levels. The final deal included more lenient standards for large trucks and SUVs. Since these larger vehicles are more profitable to manufacture than smaller vehicles, and since the Big Three were increasingly concentrated in these markets, the deal constituted a major subsidy to the profits of the Big Three. It also creates added incentive for automakers to shift investments into more gas-guzzling and dangerous vehicles.”
  • “What led employers to accept the Wagner Act and the NLRB was a sustained upsurge of working-class disruption - including nearly 9000 strikes in 1935-1937 - that had threatened their profitability or even survival. Corporate leaders decided that consenting to independent unions was preferable to continued chaos in the factories.”
  • “Successive generations of Democratic politicians failed to deliver on their promises to remove some of the legal roadblocks to unionization, most recently under Obama. Labor’s weakness since the 1940s reinforces the key lesson of the Wagner Act: without sustained pressure on business, government is unlikely to deliver pro-labor reforms, and past reforms will be subject to constant erosion. The implementation process is a never-ending war, in which business constantly tries to gain ground. Without sustained disruption on the other side, it is more or less free to do so.”
  • “Civil rights disruption was most powerful when it targeted economic elites. Politicians typically acted only once business had already shifted. This pattern was apparent to all observers of Southern politicians. … As Martin Luther King Jr. and others had predicted, the White House was reluctantly ‘pulled around’ by the needs of business, while Southern politicians were dragged kicking and screaming. The political power structure had listened, however begrudgingly, to the economic power structure.”
  • “Because the most effective tactic is not always obvious, successful movements often proceed by trial and error. Decentralization within a movement can facilitate this process by allowing local organizers to experiment and then communicate their experiences to organizers everywhere. By contract, ossified and top-down organizations tend to persist with failed strategies far longer than is appropriate - in some cases, many decades after their failure has become apparent.”

• Prophets of Deceit:A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator

• Carmageddon

  • “Getting rid of an hour-long daily commute raises people’s happiness by the equivalent of a $40,000 increase in income. Longer car commutes are linked to stress, fatigue, anxiety, social isolation, and higher blood pressure, according to another study published in 2019 in the Journal of Transport and Health.”
  • “But when a city is designed for drivers, and most people drive to work, the amount of land needed for roads and parking means cities have to be more spread out. With businesses and homes farther apart, public transport works less well, and so everyone’s commute is longer, even if they travel by train, bike or bus.”
  • “The cost of a mile of road in an urban area in America is generally around $5 million. A mile of underground railway costs $350 million. But that cost does not reflect the true costs to society. Roads impose costs on other people that railways do not. For one thing, they cost the people using them more: Actually owning a car is much more expensive than buying a train ticket. But more than that, when everybody has to use a car, the city has to spread out more. … And it is sprawl that is expensive. Over a large area, roads have to be much longer and wider than a subway would be. The more houses are spread out, the greater the cost of building sewers, putting in electricity connections and collecting trash.”
  • “Public transport requires collective decision making. Building a new railway only works if there are already people there to use it. But if people have already moved to a city without public transport, they will probably already have bought cars and moved to homes they can only access with cars. If your city is already mostly sprawling suburbia, building trains is a bit useless - people will all live too far from the tracks to be able to use them without at least driving to the station. But if you do not have the public transport, developers are unlikely to build anything other than sprawling suburbia. You cannot have public transport with sprawl, but without public transport, all you will get is sprawl. It is a catch-22. Many cities would like to become denser, but cannot find a way to start.”
  • “In cities such as New York; Washington, D.C.; London; and Amsterdam, the neighborhoods that were seen as overcrowded slums in the 1950s are often now incredibly popular, precisely because they are not wrecked by cars as everywhere else has been.”
  • “The problem is that electric cars are popular precisely because they provide an excuse to avoid doing harder things, like rebuilding our cities, or changing the habits of lifetimes. Persuading people to switch from their old gasoline car to a shiny Tesla is much easier than persuading them that they can live without a car. Hence governments are pushing electric cars, often with incentives that make no sense.” ex. In London electric cars get a 100% discount on the congestion charge.
  • “The actual ‘cost’ of congestion is what people would pay to avoid it. If so many people refuse to pay even a relatively small toll to avoid being trapped in a traffic jam, then that suggests in reality, their productivity is not really being damaged anywhere near as much as the estimates suggest. … Poll people and they will say they want wider roads to reduce congestion. And yet if you actually build these roads, you discover that they will not pay for them - their preference is revealed, and either people don’t actually mind congestion, or they would prefer not to drive.”
  • “In general the best way to reduce congestion is to charge a reasonable price for using the roads. If the price of using a road is put at a level where the people who need them the most, and have no other realistic way to get around, can reasonably afford to use them, and there is still crippling congestion, then the roads are in short supply. But if, as with the bridge in Kentucky, the result of charging is that congestion falls significantly, they you already had enough road space to begin with, or possibly too much.”
  • “What would actually help you move along faster is if the other drivers were not there. And a relatively small toll is far more likely to achieve that than a wider road. When we give people extra space for free, we are encouraging them to get around in a way that they would not pay for, for the most part. And we are effectively subsidizing the wrecking of our cities fo anyone else.”
  • “Free parking costs America somewhere between two-thirds and twice as much as it spends on all other transport infrastructure combined.”
  • “You may not pay for free parking when you park your car, but you pay for it in a thousand other ways. Shops and restaurants are more expensive because they have to buy more land than they otherwise would to provide parking. Rent is more expensive because fewer homes fit onto any given plot of land. … the cost of providing parking adds roughly 17 percent, or about $1700 to the average person’s annual rent.”
  • “One of the reasons that these manufacturers are currently selling electric cars is to give them the space from regulators to sell more gas guzzlers. It is practically built into law that sales of electric cars or lightweight cars will be cancelled out by sales of heavier, less efficient machines.” Regulations are based on average fleet-wide fuel efficiency. So selling an electric car can effectively cancel out selling a gas guzzling SUV. Companies don’t even need to sell the EVs themselves, they can buy up EV credits from other companies selling EVs. Historically, this is the only way Tesla has ever made a profit.
  • “The reality is that when you are driving in a built-up area, it ought to be difficult. You should not be able to look at a screen if you are moving, because you should need to focus on what is happening on the road ahead of you. You are, after all, maneuvering a ton of more under the hood. Driving in a place where the lanes are narrow and there are pedestrians and cyclists everywhere is really stressful. And ironically, that is why it is safer, because the stress comes from the fact that drivers are forced to concentrate. A basic rule of cities is this: If it is a relaxing place to drive, then it is invariably a god-awful place to walk.”
  • “Paris’s success shows that if you make it even just a little easier for people to not use their cars, they will move away from them in huge numbers.”
  • “As much as people are often upset about being stopped from driving on other people’s streets, they are delighted to be able to stop other people driving on their own.”
  • “In America too many cities have let their core system of public transport - buses - stagnate. Bus services are often set up to, in theory, provide transportation to anywhere in the city. But the service is often so irregular that it is not a reasonable alternative to driving. Transport agencies spend a fortune on buses that are so infrequent that nobody sane would rely on them to get to work or school, while major routes that transport lots of people to get to work are much less frequent than they could be.”
  • “The cities where people most want to live, and where you can live best without cars, are simply not adding enough homes, while cities that depend on you driving everywhere, however unsustainable it is, are growing like mushrooms. The result is, inevitably, that housing prices are rising fastest in walkable places and slowest in sprawling suburbs.”
  • “There is simply no good reason that the sustainable option - living in a decent-sized apartment or rowhouse, in a neighborhood where you can walk, cycle, and use public transport to get around - ought to be so expensive, while living in an enormous detached house and using vast quantities of natural resources is the cheap option. It is only the case because of decisions made by our leaders over decades that have compounded to create a world where wasting resources is normal and sustainable living is rare.”

• The Big Con

  • “A government department that contracts out all the services it is responsible for providing may be able to reduce costs in the short term, but it will eventually cost it more due to the loss in knowledge about how to deliver those services, and thus how to adapt the collection of capabilities within its department to meet citizens’ changing needs.”
  • “In the public sector, the costs incurred are often much higher than if the government had invested in the capacity to do the job and learned how to improve processes along the way.”
  • “A 1991 report conducted by the United States General Accounting Office on the use of consultancies in federal agencies raised concerns about the conflict of interest arising from consultancies being contracted to establish the criteria for outsourcing”
  • “Large consultancies were also using a strategy of lowballing in tenders to secure consulting contracts. In this way, some consulting contracts - particularly for new clients or in emerging markets - had also become ’loss-leaders,’ incentivizing the provision of advice that satisfies the contracting client in the short term, but that may not be in the long-term interest of the company or indeed wider society.”
  • Common contract type is “cost-plus-fixed-fee” that means the contractor can bill for additional labour and material expenses. “This type of contract is common in large and complex tenders, because it transfers the cost of failure away from the contractor to the government, and so it incentivizes companies to bid for them: they can reap the rewards without taking on the risks. But it also provides the contractor with less incentive to control costs and provide high quality products - because they can just bill the client for an y additional items.”
  • “Often the capabilities for managing the delivery of a service in-house would be completely lost after they had been outsourced, and so the costs of re-insourcing were very great. Public sector bodies had little choice but to continue using consultants.”
  • “The difference between the value they create and the wealth they take can be understood as ’economic rents.’ These rents do not necessarily stem from the ownership of scarce valuable knowledge assets, but from the possession of the means to create an impression of value. The scale and scope of the consulting industry today endows it with immense resources and networks that help to instill confidence in the value of a consultancy and the consulting profession. It is this ability to create impressions of value that enable consultancies to secure lucrative contracts. In this way, the Big Con does not just describe discursive tricks, but also how the practices of the consulting industry - what we call ‘consultology’ - combine with the broader structures of our political economy to extract rents from clients, often by enabling those clients to extract rents themselves. Ultimately, this entrenches business’ and governments’ reliance on consultancies.”
  • The interview process for consulting firms rewards overconfidence. “even if laying off 2500 employees has the potential to harm the client company, the ideal consulting candidate will behave as if that proposal is the strongest. … In few other sectors is such performed confidence in giving advice on something you have just learned about - and disregard of the potentially disastrous consequences - valued so much in the job application process. The case interview weeds out those who would be unable, or perhaps unwilling, to try to convince a client that they know what they are talking about even if they don’t really.”
  • “This skewed risk-reward relationship is at the heart of the consulting industry’s business model. The rewards reaped - the rents - usually far exceed the financial risks of taking on the contract or the costs of creating an impression of value. Unlike Arthur Andersen twenty years ago, large consultancies today can survive knocks to their reputations in the wake of public scandals with the help of their extensive resources, employing savvy legal and PR teams.”
  • “With its inherent uncertainty, lack of precedence and depleted existing capacity in the public sector, Brexit was the perfect storm for companies to extract extraordinary rewards while the risks of failure remained with the public sector, businesses and citizens.”
  • “Not only is outsourcing at scale often far costlier than alternatives, it can also potentially waste the specialized skills and expertise that already exist within the organization and it’s ecosystem - in the heads of, for example, medical researchers and nurses in the case of NKS. Crucially, doing so can also prevent those people - and their organizations - from learning and improving their skills.”
  • “Research shows that learning in organizations builds on existing knowledge and resources - the sum of which can be understood as the organization’s capacity. The knowledge that is built on may be ’explicit’ and easily measurable - for example, it could include statistics held in databases and information in internal knowledge management systems. But it is also often ’tacit’ - know-how that employees build up over time, which is harder to quantify or capture concretely.” We lose this when we outsource. And the effects aren’t noticed in the short-term, only in the long-term. “If the Rwandan government had outsourced its Ebola prevention strategy on the Congolese border to a management consultancy, for example, it would not have developed the related knowledge and resources that became foundational to its COVID-19 response”
  • “Beyond the potential for political influence when consultancies serve ‘both sides of the street’ - governments (or international governance organizations) and markets - there is also a risk that consultancies use government knowledge and information in ways that benefit business clients and undermine legislation.” ex. developing new tax rules for the government and then advising firms on how to get around those rules.
  • “There was a direct conflict of interest because McKinsey was receiving money from companies that would be affected by the deforestation reduction policies it was helping to develop. In recent years, consultancies large and small have also helped to develop a form of disclosure across powerful industries that have long be significant contributors of CO2 emissions.”
  • Environmental, social and governance criteria (ESG) - “ESG frameworks stave off democratic government intervention by creating the impression that standards are being upheld. By providing these frameworks and advising businesses on how to fulfill their criteria, consultancies large and small play a critical role in stalling meaningful, impactful and accountable responses to the climate crisis.”
  • “In the climate crisis, big consultancies are riding a new governance wave, and in doing so are providing a veil of commitment without a mandate for action.”
  • “Meeting today’s great challenges of course requires that governments also work in partnership with businesses, but doing so effectively requires that public sector organizations are able to understand their landscape, decide who best to collaborate with, and manage the necessary contracts. None of this is possible without dynamic internal capacity and capabilities. Already in the 1960s, during the Apollo program, NASA’s director of procurement, Ernest Brackett, warned that NASA would lose its intelligence if it kept outsourcing; it would become ‘captured by brochuremanship’ - to the point that it would now know who to work with or how to write the terms of reference.”
  • “Rebuilding capabilities in public sector organizations must begin with recognizing government as a value creator in the economy - rather than a wasteful and inefficient value extractor at worst, or a market fixer at best. For this to happen, it must put into place processes and investments that allow it to learn and adapt.”
  • “In the same way that publicly traded companies are mandated to provide information about their material risks to potential investors via financial reports, companies that provide consulting advice should be mandated to provide clear information about conflicting interest risks to potential clients.”

• Palo Alto

• Crack-Up Capitalism

• The Privatization of Everything

  • “We are both citizens and consumers, but privatization encourages us to approach public goods merely as a shopper while convincing us to forget that fellow citizens need that public good too. We come to believe that our own satisfaction is paramount, even if gaining that satisfaction leaves others behind.”
  • “A consumer should never pay for a service he does not use. Citizens, on the other hand, agree to pay for services they don’t directly use because they can see how they benefit all of us, and they see the indirect benefit to themselves. As citizens, we realize that even if we never set foot on a city bus the fact that others do alleviates congestion, reduces air pollution, benefits the economy by getting people to work, and benefits all of us be getting people we rely on - bank workers, the dry cleaners, the barista, or our mother’s caregiver - to their jobs. So it is something that all citizens benefit from by subsidizing. A consumer may not see that, but it is obvious to citizens.”
  • “Private business interests have no interest in transparency or in providing open access; they consider information to be proprietary. And when private interests get involved in the delivery of public goods, they suddenly have a stake in policy - skin in the game - and will muster their ample resources to influence laws and regulations. It’s rare that their interests will actually align with the public’s or with preserving democracy.”
  • “The most efficient way to generate knowledge is to share new ideas; the best way to generate profit is to prevent others from learning and selling your new ideas. Truly new innovations arise before it’s clear how they will be used; the profit motive seeks only innovations that have clear use cases and a path to market.”

• Cobalt Red

• When McKinsey Comes to Town

• Dedicated The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing

  • “By making commitments, we may miss out on the latest novelty. But by not making commitments, we will definitely mess out on the deep joy that can only come ten years (or perhaps even ten minutes!) into an experience to which we dedicate our full attention. Sustained engagement is the only way we can bring form to our world - the only way we can separate what is important from what isn’t. That’s why cultivating the skill of attention is one of the primary goals of education.”
  • “When public live is something we approach as an active participant - as a co-owner - we experience it as a series of committed relationships: to systems, processes, projects, places, and neighbors. When those shared enterprises struggle in the short term, your relationships keep you loyal over the long term - and even transform your original conceptions of your personal interests and ideals. But when we approach public live passively, as an exercise in selecting among options, we never form those relationships at all. There’s no sense of loyalty to carry us through those problems. When a system fails to meet or understand our interests and ideals, we feel angry and alienated.”
  • “These two models of education - education for attachment and education for advancement - exist in tension in kids’ lives today. On the one side are the informal mentors and apprenticeships, the teachers who carve out time to inculcate reverence for their subjects and the coaches who speak often of duty, and the message that education is about learning to deepen your relationship with things bigger than ourselves. On the other side are abstract skills and enrichment camps, resume padding and grade grubbing, and the message that education is about learning to prepare yourself for the next stage. The Culture of Open Options has its hand on one side of the scale: the one that gives us the tools to keep as many doors as possible open, while failing to cultivate the bonds that help us decide which doors are worth walking through.”
  • “If commitment is the hard and long road to meaning in an increasingly meaningless world, apocalypse is the quick and easy one. And when the on-ramps to the former are few and far between, you will see more people choosing the latter - to everyone’s detriment.”

• Dream States

• Number Go Up

• Extremely Online

• The Internet Con:How to Seize the Means of Computation

• Wallet Activism

• Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

• The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire

• Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

• The Age of Insecurity

See also

• What I Read or Listened to This Week
• What I Read or Listened to This Week
• What I Read or Listened to This Week
• What I Read or Listened to This Week
• What I Read or Listened to This Week