(2025-03-26) Davies The Most Ambitious Crossover

Dan Davies: the most ambitious crossover. I’ve been trailing this for a while, but my Niskanen Center White Paper is nearly out, and the summary essay for it has now been published along with a load of others, in a collection called “The Law Of Abundance”. That title is meant to be a contrast to “The Law of Constraint”, in its sense meaning the way that administrative law is currently set up to stop the government from doing things.

I personally think this is all about cybernetics, of course, and I can dimly perceive some foreshadowing in “Designing Freedom” (although irritatingly no pithy quotes as yet). The modern regulatory state was set up for a world in which the government had a lot of state capacity, compared to the variety it had to regulate. So the problem was to constrain what it could do

Them days are gone; the government barely has enough capacity these days to chase after its basic responsibilities, let alone to launch new megaprojects. And so it needs an entirely different set of relationships, one that allows richer communication and negotiation to facilitate compromise and agreement to do necessary things. The 1970s regulatory state isn’t up to that, so it needs to be rethought.

1. What’s a nice guy like you doing in a place like this? There are people associated with the Abundance Agenda, and a few contributors to this collection, who aren’t natural bedfellows of mine... whatever version of left-liberalism describes my personal politics, it is currently very weak indeed. And consequently, it can’t afford to be making enemies

2. That sounds like weak sauce to be honest. Well OK then I’ll put it a bit stronger than that, I actually sympathize a lot more with this one than quite a few causes I’ve previously allowed myself to become an online Reply Guy for

3. Isn’t this just a rebrand for YIMBYism? I don’t think so. It’s more of a recognition that knee-jerk YIMBY cheerleading hasn’t got anywhere and that, in the final analysis, there is no substitute for reluctantly giving up on the chortles and asking the difficult questions about what’s actually gone wrong. Personally, I do think there’s far too much emphasis on housebuilding and homeownership, and that (not coincidentally) there are a lot of very wrong theories of real estate economics knocking around Abundanceland, but it’s maybe my job to redress that.

4. So what’s your paper actually about? Rather than the regulations themselves, we need to look at the overall system by which the regulatory state is brought to a place where it prevents things happening which have majority support. Because if you look at that system, you often find that the actual role of NIMBYs is pretty small. There aren’t very many of them, and whenever things end up in an actual court, they tend to lose.

it’s the threat of hypothetical NIMBYs that causes the sclerosis, not actual NIMBYs

It’s the quasi-legal aspect of the planning system itself that causes the risk. Achieving Abundance is going to require looking again at state capacity, particularly the capacity of the state to communicate and make decisions.

"Are you any closer to being able to incorporate a theory of power into this so-called “public choice cybernetics” like Margaret Levi asked six months ago?"" Nope, and it’s getting embarrassing.