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RomanDavis comments on Open Thread: June 2010 - Less Wrong
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There's a pretty good precedent for this happening in the form of the railway system in early America. I think I'd classify it as a market failure as private roads and railways have a way of becoming local monopolies and having an enormous advantage when it comes to rent-seeking behavior.
It's not that it's impossible, I just don't think it's a very good idea.
One of the hidden assumptions I was thinking of is the assumption that government built roads have been a net benefit for America. The highway system has been a large implicit subsidy for all kinds of business models and lifestyle choices that are not obviously optimal. America's dependence on oil and outsize energy demands are in large part a function of the incentives created by huge government expenditure on highways. Suburban sprawl, McMansions, retail parks and long commutes are all unintended consequences of the implicit subsidies inherent in large scale government road construction.
American culture and society would probably look quite different without a history of government road construction. It's not obvious to me that it would not look better by many measures.
Yes but you'd be stuck with complex and inefficent series of toll roads. It might work, but I doubt. Not efficiently anyways.
Not necessarily. If you've ever been to Disney World, it's not like that. And hell, government roads in the states and Japan often dissolve into a complex and inefficient series of toll roads, at least in some areas.
I'm much more worried about uncompetitive practices, like powerful local monopolies and rent seeking behavior.
Disney world owns the land, they can do whatever they want. But here in order to make efficient roads, we have to use eminent domain. A private company wouldn't be able to do that. In order to have a governmentless society, you have to a) create a nearly impossible to maintain system of total anarchy like exists in parts of Afghanistan today or b) create a very corrupt and broken society ruled by private corporations, which is essentially a government anyways.
The Kelo case allows government to use its eminent domain powers on the behalf of private companies. Why couldn't a private road builder borrow this government power?
You actually support the Kelo case? To me that's like a Glenn Beck conspiracy theory come to life.
Yup. Mind killed. I'm out, guys. Was fun while it lasted.
Why do you assume I support the Court's decision? All I did was state that under current United States law, Houshalter's objection was possible to overcome.
The government does use private contracters in many cases for different projects. It might work on roads, I'm not sure if they already use it, but its still alot differnet from asking a private corporation to decide when and where to build roads.
They do. And private corporations or councils already decide where to build the roads for some things, it's just that all of those things only work if they're already connected to other infrastructure, which, in the US, means public federal, state and locally built roads.
Well, I think you aren't really imaginative enough in your view of anarchy, but... I'm not an anarchist and I'm not going to defend anarchy.
I disagree with the idea that efficient roads require imminent domain. It's not even hard to prove. All I have to do is give one example of a business that was made without imminent domain. The railroad system, which I brought up before.
I still mostly think a nation of private roads is a bad idea, since it's hard to imagine a way or scenario in which they wouldn't be a local monopoly.
Actually, in the U.S. at least, railroads did get lots of land grants, right-of-way rights, and similar subsidies from the government. So yeah.
Which is part of the reason I think it's a bad idea. The railroads constantly petitioned for those rights, that money and essentially leached off the American people. That's what rent seeking means.
Are railroads that good an example? Some railroads and subways were built using eminent domain although I don't know how much. And many of the large railroads built in the US in the second half of the 20th century went through land that did not have any private ownership but was given to the railroads by the government.
Railroads are a good example of a bad idea. The reason I picked them is that they were terrible, if I was going to pick innovative and creative real estate purchases by private industry, I'd be talking about McDonalds or Starbucks.
Railroads weren't a terrible idea. The canal system was a terrible idea, not railroads. Railroads created lots of industry that wouldn't have been possible without them. Many 19th century leaders thought of them as the best thing that ever happened to America.
The system of canals built in the early 19th century in the United States allowed the settlement of the old west and the development of industry in the north east (by allowing grain from western farms to reach the east). Why do you consider them a terrible idea? They were one of the centerpieces of the American System, which was largely successful.
I think they might have been been better as wither a fully government venture or a private one. When they merge, a conflict of interest becomes immediately present.
That's interesting. I wouldn't expect there to be many examples of working privatized roads and their effects on a nationwide scale, but if there were, I'd love to see more about them, or even a good paper based on a hypothetical.
I think you're stuck in the mindset of 'if it wasn't for our government provided roads where would we drive our cars?'. Such a world would probably have fewer private cars and be arranged in such a way that many ordinary people could get by perfectly well without a car, as is the case in many European and Japanese cities.
This article might help you understand some of the hidden assumptions many Americans operate under. Note: this guy has some rather wacky ideas but his articles on 'traditional cities' are pretty interesting.
I strongly agree with you that the US federal government has spent too much on road subsidies over the years and should decrease its current spending.
That said, not everywhere is Juneau, Alaska; not all sites connected to government roads are a "Suburban Hell," and not all inhabitants of the suburbs would prefer to live in a "Traditional City." Roads are useful for accommodating a highly mobile, atomistic society that exploits new resources and adopts new local trade routes every 20 years or so. Cars and parking lots are useful for separating people who have recently immigrated from all different places and who really don't like each other and don't want to have much to do with each other. Interstate highways were built for evacuation and civil defense as well as for actual transport. Finally, regardless of whether you prefer roads or trains, some level of government subsidy and/or coordination is probably needed to get the most efficient transportation system possible.
In any case, this thread started out as a discussion of Traditional vs. Bayesian rationality, did it not? Improving government policy was merely the example chosen to illustrate a point. It seems unsportsmanlike to shoot that point down on the grounds that virtually all government does more harm than good. Even if such a claim were true, one might still want to know how to generate government policies that do relatively less harm, given a set of political constraints that temporarily prevent enacting a strong version of (anarcho)libertarianism.
The failure of government is not a problem of not knowing which government policies would do relatively less harm. The primary problem of government is that there is little incentive to implement such policies. Trying to improve government by working to figure out better policies is like trying to avoid being eaten by a lion by making a sound logical argument for the ethics of vegetarianism. The lion has no more interest in the finer points of ethics than a politician does in the effects of policy on anything other than his own self-interest.
Your link provides very little evidence for your claim. At the national level, to say that a program costs $1 million per year is unimpressive. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the multiplier effect for mohair production is quite low, say, 0.5. I suspect that is it rather higher than that, since multiple people will go and card and weave and spin the damn fibers and then sell them to each other at art fairs, but let's say it's 0.5. That means you're wasting $500,000 a year. In the context of a $5 trillion annual budget, you're looking at 1 part per 10 million, or an 0.00001% increase in efficiency. Why should one of our 545 elected representatives, or even one of their 20,000 staffers, make this a priority to eliminate? The amazing thing is that the subsidy was eliminated at all, not that it crept back in. All systems have some degree of parasitism, 'rent', or waste. This is not exactly low-hanging fruit we're talking about here.
More generally, I have worked for a few different politicians, and so far as I could tell, most of them mostly cared about figuring out better policies subject to maintaining a high probability of being re-elected. None of them appeared to have the slightest interest in directly profiting from their work as public servants, nor in exploiting their positions for fame, sex, etc. Those are just the cases that make the news. In my opinion, based on a moderate level of personal experience, the assumption that politicians are primarily motivated by self-interest at the margin in equilibrium is simply false.
What did you take my claim to be? The example in the link is intended to illustrate the fact that the problem of politics is not one of figuring out better policy. It is an example of a policy that is universally agreed to be bad and yet has persisted for over 60 years, despite a brief period in which it was temporarily stamped out. The magnitude of the subsidy in this case may be small but there are many thousands of such bad policies, some of much greater individual magnitude, and they add up. The example is intentionally a small and un-controversial example since it is intended to illustrate that if even minor bad policies like this are hard to kill then vastly larger ones are unlikely to be eliminated without structural reform.
Giving this appearance is fairly important to succeeding as a politician so this is not indicative of much. I find it more relevant to judge by actual actions and results produced rather than by words or carefully cultivated appearances.
As a well known politician once noted, you can fool some of the people all of the time.
Indeed you can! Be aware, though, that memes about government corruption and the people who peddle them may have just as much power to fool you as the 'official' authorities. Hollywood, for example, has a much larger propaganda budget than the US Congress. When's the last time a Hollywood movie showcased virtuous politicians?
Also, beware of insulated arguments. If you assume that (a) politicians are amazingly good at disguising their motives, and (b) that politicians do in fact routinely disguise their motives, your assertions are empirically unfalsifiable. If you disagree, consider this: what could a politician do to convince you that he was honestly motivated by something like altruism?
An Inconvenient Truth? Seriously though, I don't think Hollywood is particularly tough on politicians. It's a major enabler for the cult of the presidency with heroic presidents saving the world from aliens, asteroids and terrorists. Evil corporations and businessmen get a far worse rap. The mainstream media is much too soft on politicians in the US in my opinion as well. Where's the US Paxman?
I think some politicians actually believe that they are acting for the 'greater good'. Sometimes when they lobby for special interests they really convince themselves they are doing a good thing. It is sometimes easier to convince others when you believe your own spiel - this is well known in sales. They surely often think they are saving others from themselves by restricting their liberties and trampling on their rights. Ultimately what they really believe is somewhat irrelevant. I judge them by how they respond to incentives, whose interests they actually promote and what results they achieve.
I don't think being motivated by altruism is desirable and I don't think pure altruism exists to any significant degree.
It would either be polite or impolite to make explicit who the "some of the people" are that you refer to in this sentence, and what relevance this has to Mass_Driver's remark. I am curious to hear which.
Mass_Driver appears to be one of the people who can be fooled all of the time since he judges politicians by what they say and how they present themselves rather than by what their actions say about their incentives and motivations. I did not intend to be ambiguous.
Some governments cause much less damage than others, so I think there's something to study.
I mentioned elsewhere that governments of relatively small states with relatively homogeneous populations seem to do better than average. Scaling these relative successes up appears problematic.
Even among large heterogeneous states, some do better than others.
If small homogeneous states do best, then campaigning for devolution to the best available approximation of such might be the best move.
Yes, that or seasteading. I'm also a firm believer in the 'voting with your feet' approach to campaigning. I have no desire to wait around until a democratic majority are convinced for improvements to happen locally. Migration is one of the few competitive pressures on governments today.
That's one of the principal aims of the states' rights movement.
That site you linked to has an article comparing Toledo, Ohio to Toledo, Spain. Its kind of unfair because Toledo Ohio is a relativley small city and is dying economically. I was kind of offended because I live really close to there, but he does make a point.
Toledo, Spain: Pop 80,810, Unemployment 10% (estimated from Wikipedia figures). Toledo, Ohio: Pop 316,851 (city), Unemployment 13%.
Wow. That's really very eye-opening. And as someone who has spent time in old cities outside the US and doesn't even drive, I'm a bit shocked about how much of an assumption I seem to be operating with about what a city should look like.
Japanese cities still have massive infrastructure and public transportation subsidies. It's not OMG how can we not have cars?; it's OMG how can we actually have transportation in a non governmental way that actually operates in a healthy market?
City scale transportation infrastructure doesn't require large amounts of governmental involvement. Traditional European cities evolved for much of their history with minimal government involvement. City level infrastructure would be well within the capabilities of private enterprise in a world with more private ownership of public space. Large privately constructed resorts (think Disneyland) illustrate the feasibility of the concept although they are not necessarily great adverts for its desirability.