State capacity and eight parking spaces

And he doesn't do it because he thinks the experience would be so miserable compared to working in tech

I've worked for the US federal government, big tech and another big corp. I would say my experience with the government (and the non tech big corp) was more positive than big tech, as my team was more focused on working/growing together rather than trying to individually outshine everyone else. I feel like we were working towards practical goals that has clear benefits for our customers rather than trying to hit seemingly arbitrary kpi's.

Working for the government I also feel like my work/life balance was most respected as well. YMMV though. Admittedly, N=1 here.

I have to admit this essay struck me as sort of strange. On the one hand, the EV charging station seems like something fairly straightforward, that should be approved and built fairly quickly. On the other hand, it's just an EV charging station, and without knowing anything more about it, I am just as inclined to believe that this is some small pet project of interest to the author, who no one else really cares about, and he's invoking some grand criticism of government writ large as a way of bringing urgency and grandeur his idiosyncratic interest that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

EV sales are in the middle of a nationwide decline, especially for one of the major manufacturers. I doubt it has anything to do with the 8-space parking lot in Seattle in particular. Add to this stories about charging station compatibility, and I'm not surprised there isn't a greater sense of urgency from the city.

I have my pet projects I'd like to see finished as well, but I don't blame my municipality for not prioritizing them. They have a lot on their plate. It has nothing to do with capture or overregulation, but priorities with constrained staff, budget, and time. People change their minds and city priorities change with popular sentiment.

In some ways, this is a good example of why some prudence is warranted, and maybe you should get the other side of the story. The essay neglects to mention that four of the eight charging stations would be owned by Tesla for example — something that if you're not opposed to, you might at least admit is reasonable for the city to reevaluate — and there is apparently contaminated soil at least nearby the site.

I'm generally in favor of reregulation or deregulation, but I generally feel like land use, environmental, and public space or resources are something where there should be a lot of scrutiny and layers of approval. Once it's gone, it's hard to reclaim and expensive to clean up. I also feel like many examples of complaints in this area and mention of things like Abundance are just like this — someone complains their personal project of interest isn't done fast enough, criticizing the government for being cumbersome and overwrought, while neglecting to mention all the reasons why people might not prioritize their pet project, or why their pet project might reasonably be seen as requiring safeguards or approval processes. The reason why the government is slow with your pet project is because not everyone agrees with you, and there is a commons issue involved.

Meanwhile, discussion about deregulation of things that actually involve personal choice, with little or no public commons issues involved, like medical care, go by the wayside and are never mentioned, or are even hyperregulated.

>In the article the author says we should use "pre-approved vendor lists" or "streamlined approvals" and that sounds great in principle, but could also easily be exploited.

As patio11 would say, "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero". Fraud is bad, but if fighting fraud involves so much red tape that it costs more than whatever petty corruption could ever cost, it's bad.

[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

> "pre-approved vendor lists" or "streamlined approvals" and that sounds great in principle, but could also easily be exploited.

Nearly any kind of public spending can be exploited, including auctions. There are countless cases where the cheapest vendor that satisfies the written criteria is chosen, only to end up with delays, cost overruns that far outweigh the initial savings, or equipment that malfunctions and breaks.

I know somebody who was in charge of writing these auctions for their government department. They picked a vendor, and then worked backwards to write the requirements so that only that vendor would satisfy them. Not because of corruption, but because they knew that vendor's equipment was quality.

There was another case, in a different department, where this was not done - the auction was written naively (and honestly), and the cheapest vendor chosen. The equipment failed within months, putting people at risk, and a different vendor had to be quickly chosen.

It's better to just put some conflict-of-interest guards in place, and then trust the judgment of whoever needs those goods, than to try to eliminate corruption through bureaucratic procedures. Because it can't be eliminated with bureaucracy - but efficiency can, and will be.

> for the most part regulations and due process emerged to protect public interests from private capture.

In truth I think it's a mix of this, and the opposite--where private interests have already captured the public good.

Regulations and process are just scar tissue from mistakes of the past. Excessive process indicates abundant past mistakes.

If we want to go back to taking risks and making mistakes, by all means, let's cut red tape and get rid of process. But, we should do it knowing the tradeoff we're making. I think some people here just think "regulation/process = bad" and "getting rid of regulation/process = good" but it's more complex than that.

> In the article the author says we should use "pre-approved vendor lists" or "streamlined approvals" and that sounds great in principle, but could also easily be exploited.

Every kind of regulation can be exploited and is currently being exploited. GDPR led to law firms squeezing money out of neighborhood bars with cease and desists. Government grants spawn companies doing the exact minimum to keep getting grants without building real businesses.

I totally agree that lobbyism is a massive problem (and often the reason we get such complex regulation—they shut out the little players). But any proposed solution will have to be some type of risk.

“ that for the most part regulations and due process emerged to protect public interests from private capture”

I just flat out don’t buy this. The majority of regulations I see “abundance” type people arguing against were never aimed at curtailing private capture. They are aimed at keeping neihborhoods unchanged for generations, making sure everyone up-and-down society gets veto power over any project regardless of type or upside of it, and making sure arbitrary unrelated “goods” are enforced with as much bureaucracy as possible during development (the best example of this is trying to get solar panels built and having to fight many years of “environmental” review for something so desperately needed for our environment).

Biggest problems with "Abundance" are:

1) Somehow he decided euclidean zoning was a leftist project. Most leftists and environmentalists I've ever known hate euclidean zoning and this includes many urban planners. Euclidean zoning exists pretty much because property owners want to be able to exclude nearby land uses. It's fundamentally conservative, especially when the goal is to enforce limited housing density.

2) Setting up euclidean zoning as the main whipping boy and then saying "and also air quality regulations are basically the same thing" is a form of straw-manning the stuff he's arguing against.

3) He sets up a dichotomy between California and Texas ignoring that a lot of California's problems are conservative (downzoning, prop 13) and also ignoring the weaknesses in the Texas model including corporations running roughshod over locals (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7_WDzPyoqU) a fragile power grid, huge flooding problems etc. It's possible to look at quality of life metrics and see that Texas is doing quite badly. Also, you had the whole tech moving to Austin thing that already fizzled out.

4) He set up developers as the heroes in the story and apparently got a lot of his info from private equity ride-alongs. He ignores that developers are also often land speculators and are in favor of blocking competitors projects and downzoning areas to keep land value high. (https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/abundance-hudson-yards-west?u...)

Basically Abundance is a way for Ezra Klein and his fellow travelers to repackage Clinton-era triangulation and Obama-era neoliberalism as something completely new, so the party can carry on with its pro-donor agenda and ignore why they keep losing. That's also the reason why it was astroturfed into every left media space with a massive marketing budget.

I think most people have an opinion similar to NIMBYism. Everyone agrees there are too many regulations but no one agrees which ones are the extra. Every rule is someone's highest concern.

That's why part of the argument in Abundance is that current processes give too many people too much veto power. When every issue is someone's pet issue nothing can ever get done.

Regulations are like code of a program. It's the business logic of how we want the world to be.

Like all code, it can be buggy, bloated and slow, or it can be well-written and efficiently achieve ambitious things.

If you have crappy unmaintainable code that doesn't work, then deleting it is an obvious improvement.

Like in programming, it takes a lot of skill to write code that achieves its goals in a way that is as simple as possible, but also isn't oversimplified to the point of failing to handle important cases.

The pro-regulation argument isn't for naively piling up more code and more bloat, but for improving and optimizing it.

I think state capacity shouldn't be a left-right issue. Whether you want oil rigs or public parks to be built, everyone can agree that once the decision is made, it should be built swiftly and well.

And the public should be able to have an expectation that when the government says they'll do something, they're capable of doing so within a reasonable budget and timeframe.

In my neck of the woods, you’d be called a capitalist bootlicker for this point of view by many lefties. I get called that for basically any suggestion besides complete communist revolution.

I can always tell who on the left is ideologically poisoned by how vehemently they hate anything related to the idea that current government processes and regulations could improve or that government regulations can go (sometimes very) wrong. As if somehow that admission is the same as wanting anarcho-libertarianism.

Spot on. I read the article wondering when they were going to describe what specifically failed or got stuck. Instead it's just a vague implication that such redesigns must have been unnecessary, but never saying exactly why such redesigns were being done. What/who is the project currently waiting on? It's never specified.

In light of that, maybe a better description of the problem is more the absence of responsibility/accountability (for both the proponent and the reviewers, although it's not indicated which is dropping the ball here) rather than the processes/regulations themselves.