Bottom-up

The next Bottom-Up chat will feature Adam Thierer, president of the Progress and Freedom Foundation and mastermind of the Technology Liberation Front, the world’s leading libertarian tech policy blog. One of his recurring features at TLF is an annual review of the most important tech policy books of the preceding year. He’s starting to work on the 2010 edition, and this is your chance to get a sneak preview of the big tech policy ideas of 2010. Is Nick Carr is right that the Internet is making us stupid? Is Clay Shirky right that the Internet is making us more generous and sociable? Is Richard Clarke right that the Internet is making us vulnerable to terrorists? You’ll have to stop by to find out. We can also talk about Adam’s work on Internet free speech and recent tech policy developments like the Google/Verizon network neutrality deal.

Please join us tomorrow (Wednesday) night at 9 PM Eastern. To participate, just click through to this post and look in the lower-right-hand corner for the Envolve widget.

Will Wilkinson revisits his case against birthright citizenship:

Now, if you’re a solidaristic nationalist, as most notable liberals are, the ideal of liberal equality suggests something like equality of opportunity for full insider status for people who are already inside nation’s borders. To be treated as an equal means to be treated as one of us — as a full-fledged member of the tribe. That is, when you’re inside the fence. Birthright citizenship approximates equality of access to insider status for people inside the fence. In contrast, to be offered access to markets inside the fence but with little chance of ever becoming a fully-vested insider or member is to codify a fundamental inequality of status. Second-class citizens!!!

The totally stupefying thing to liberal cosmopolitans about the worry about second-class citizens or partial insiders is that liberal nationalists find this worry so compelling even when it is abundantly clear that excluding outsiders from both labor markets and citizenship opportunities does rather more to reinforce inequality and perpetuate the miseries of poverty than does excluding them from citizenship opportunities only. Of course, the stupefaction goes both ways. When I argue for ending birthright citizenship as part of a larger strategy to increase openness to partial insiders, I think it’s hard for liberal nationalists to grok this as a project motivated by an ideal
of liberal equality.

I think it’s telling that Will doesn’t actually link to any of the liberals he’s supposedly arguing with here. He seems to imagine that his critics buy his claim that ending birthright citizenship would lead to a common North American labor market, but that they’re so horrified by the prospect of “second-class citizenship” that they’re not willing to make the trade. But the simpler explanation is the simpler one: they’re just not convinced that ending birthright citizenship would have any positive effects on the American electorate’s openness to immigration reform. The handful of data poins Will offers from the very different political context of the European Union simply aren’t persuasive.

Moreover, I have yet to see Will address the point I made in response to his original article that most welfare benefits aren’t tied to citizenship. If he’s right that opposition to freedom of movements is primarily motivated by worries about immigrant access to government benefits, that might be an argument for further restricting immigrants efforts to government benefits. Birthright citizenship just isn’t binding constraint.

This description of his imagined opponent’s arguments strikes me as particularly off-base:

To remove the citizenship from the Constitution would thus amount to an act of symbolic violence against hard-won American ideals of equality. The usually unstated implication is that such a development would indicate a collapse of political will to defend equal freedom generally, and that other gains in equality might therefore unravel.

There’s nothing symbolic about birthright citizenship. Each year, thousands of Americans are born to undocumented immigrants. Birthright citizenship guarantees that when they grow up, they’ll enjoy the same freedoms that the children of American citizens do. Ending birthright citizenship means that, instead, they’ll be forced to live underground in the country they call home. This isn’t an “act of symbolic violence against hard-won American ideals of equality.” It’s a sacrifice of the actual freedom and equality of actual human beings who will be born on American soil over the coming decade.

The Three Gorges Dam, which displaced more than a million people.

At the urging of several readers, I’m now reading James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, which is a critique of what Scott calls “high modernism”: the kind of “clean slate” thinking that so enthused Western elites during the 20th century. I’ll probably have more to say about Scott’s book once I’m farther into it, but it reminded me of this excellent article about China by The Nation‘s Chris Hayes, published last December after he took a trip there:

The key, in the eyes of the government that runs Chongqing, is planning. “We have plans, timetables and goals in our minds whenever we do anything,” said Qian Lee, who works in the local government’s foreign economic outreach bureau.

“We as a government give guidance and sort of categorize those who want to come to the cities,” Wen said. “There are several tiers…. The first group of villagers will go to the downtown center. The second group will go to six regional centers we are building. And the third group will go to the urban places that are closest to their home villages, such as the country towns and townships…. We have thirty-one district centers and 103 towns.” For each of these three tiers–downtown Chongqing, the six satellites and the thirty-one district centers–the government has annual targeted population levels for the next three years.

Chongqing is so proud of this planned vision it has constructed a $50 million exhibition hall on the banks of the Yangtze that showcases its past, present and future. Its centerpiece is an 892-square-meter scale model of the city. The tour guide flips a switch, and a comic-book night descends on the model; the rivers glow indigo. She flips another switch and lights up several dozen clusters of buildings, future projections of structures that will be completed in the next five years, then the next ten. Finally she puts all the lights on to reveal the future of Chongqing in all its miniature glory.

The tour ends in a room with a 360-degree, full-screen projection of a computer-rendered flyover of the future metropolis. Unlike the real smogbound and dreary Chongqing, it is bathed in piercing sunlight, and because of software limitations or of an oversight by the creators, not one of the humans who populate this new world–its expensive waterside condos, outdoor stadium and grand office building lobbies–is Chinese.

The ethos that animates this exhibition hall, a High Modernist faith in progress brought about by “scientific” planning, is so distant from the demoralized America of 2009 that my time in the city felt like a visit to Chicago in 1890 on the eve of the World’s Fair. (Shanghai will be hosting the World Expo next year.) There’s no larger representation of this animating faith than the Three Gorges Dam, which we toured one afternoon. The project took fifteen years and cost $30 billion. It will eventually provide up to 4 percent of China’s electricity (the equivalent of about 500 coal-fired power plants). In order to build it, 1.25 million people were forced out of their homes on the banks of the Yangzte, and 1,500 archaeological sites, including ancient temples, were drowned.

To the Chinese elites we talked with, though, the future is everything. Although Chinese civilization (and administrative bureaucracy) is 5,000 years old, no one seemed interested in talking about anything that occurred before 1978. Such intense futurism is easy to lampoon, but it also seems the only worldview one could hold on to in the face of the challenges Chinese planners must overcome. Pick any major city in America and start adding 500,000 people a year. It wouldn’t be long before it broke under the strain. It is no small thing to design a sewer system for a city growing at that pace. Just ask the 10 million residents of Mumbai’s slums, whose lives are literally mired in shit because there is no access to a sewage system. So if the dark side of Chongqing is the triumph of Robert Moses’s vision over that of Jane Jacobs, the silver lining is that–at a technical level, at least–this vision is pursued and executed with what seemed like an impressive degree of mastery.

Skepticism is warranted about the apparent technical mastery of high modernist planners. The reason high modernism was so seductive to 20th century intellectuals was precisely that viewing grandiose plans from a distance makes their flaws hard to spot. If a visitor from Europe had toured one of America’s great urban highways or public housing projects the year the opened, he probably would have been impressed by the ambition and seeming technical mastery they exhibited. The same can be said for Soviet communism in its early years, which fooled a number of otherwise-intelligent journalists.

Viewing a high modernist project at a snapshot in time can give a very misleading impression. There’s no way a scale model or a tour can tell you what the human cost of the project might have been. Nor is there any way to know if the grandiose promises made for it will be realized.

China is going through roughly the same phase of technological development that the Western world passed through in the first half of the 20th century: the country has mastered the basics of industrialization and are reaping huge gains from economies of scale and a more educated workforce. The engineers and bureaucrats who are organizing ever-more-impressive feats of industrial production have, like their Western counterparts of a century ago, convinced themselves that a society can be planned in the same manner that a factory floor can be.

This is unlikely to be any more true in China than it was in the West; it turns out that people don’t like being treated like interchangeable cogs in a vast machine. But as in the West, it will take a while for ordinary people to figure out how to organize themselves to effectively resist these schemes.

Over at Ars Technica, John Siracusa has a good summary of the state of the mobile market. Google’s Android operating system has been firing on all cylinders recently. Some analysts have Android-based phones taking the lead in sales in recent months. The installed base for the iPhone is still a lot larger, but the gap is closing.

Siracusa runs through some of Android’s key advantages. Probably the most important is that all four major wireless carriers in the US are offering Android phones, while the iPhone is only available from AT&T. Google is partnering with a variety of hardware vendors, while Apple is manufacturing all of its phones itself.

It’s fun to play armchair quarterback and speculate on which factors will most help or hinder the development of the competing mobile platforms. But I think it makes more sense to think about the big picture. Apple’s basic strategy is a top-down one: they’re trying to make the best phone, partner with the best carrier, allow only the best applications in the iTunes store, force developers to use the best development tools, and so forth. Steve Jobs is a pretty smart guy, and he has a lot of talented people working for him, so it’s not surprising that the result has been pretty good. But it’s also inherently brittle: the iPhone will only succeed if Apple makes the right call on all of these decisions. If Apple screws up even a single decision (say, comes out with a defective phone or chooses the wrong carrier), the whole platform suffers.

In contrast, because Android phones are available on dozens of devices, from four different carriers, with relatively permissive app store policies, its platform is much more resilient. It’s not a big deal if one hardware vendor produces a dud because there are lots of other phones to choose from. Google doesn’t care which wireless carriers do well since they’re all selling Android phones.

Developing a new platform is a discovery process. It’s a safe bet that people will find exciting new uses for cell phones, but nobody can predict exactly what they’re going to be. By working with many partners, Google maximizes the odds that Android will be able to fill whatever niches that emerge. In contrast, Apple has shut out many companies that have tried to join the iPhone bandwagon. If one of those companies discovers a “killer app,” Apple will miss out.

I think these weaknesses have become a lot more obvious in the year since I started writing about the iPhone app store. A top-down strategy works well for a company that’s pioneering a new product category. Central planning can bring together all the pieces necessary for a successful product and put them all in a shiny, easy-to-use package. But as the smart phone market matures, customers get more demanding. They don’t just want a generic smart phone, they want one that’s tailored to their specific needs. Google has dozens of partners that are helping them serve the entire smartphone market. Apple is going alone, trying to build a single product to serve every user. It’s not surprising that Apple is losing ground.

Disclosure: I’m an intern at Google this summer. This post doesn’t reflect the views of Google, nor is it based on any confidential information.

Tomorrow evening I’ll be doing another Envolve chat, and I’m excited that we’ll have a special guest. My friend Reihan Salam is a blogger for National Review, a columnist for Forbes, a fellow at the New America Foundation, and a policy advisor to E21, a relatively new think tank in New York. Most importantly, from my perspective, he is the nation’s leading advocate of keeping America weird. I hope you’ll join us Monday night at 9 PM Eastern. To join in, just click through to the blog and look for the chat box in the lower-right hand corner of the screen.

If you don’t normally read the comment section, I encourage you to click through to yesterday’s post about “clean slate” thinking. I particularly want to endorse this perspective from Jed Harris:

I think it turns on on whether one gives more weight to models or observations. The modernist architects and planners had very strong models, and ignored or had contempt for actually existing social reality, so they didn’t work very hard to observe or understand it. They didn’t feel any obligation to test their theories in the small before trying to apply them in the large. They didn’t have to listen to “the little people” who didn’t understand the theory and only knew what they personally observed.

This is exactly right, and it succinctly makes a point that I’ve tried to make in the past. Jed goes on to argue that “the most serious threat from theory run amok at the expense of observation seems to be neo-classical economics.” Prompting a thoughtful response from some other readers, especially Jess.

I think I share Jed’s sentiment but wouldn’t quite put it this way. Models by themselves aren’t threats to anything. What matters is how models are used. The neoclassical model, like all models, is an approximation of reality, and it fits some problems better than others.

To pick a silly example at random, a few weeks ago there was some online chatter about this article where Terry Savage chastises some little girls for running a lemonade stand where the product was available for free:

“You must charge something for the lemonade,” I explained. “That’s the whole point of a lemonade stand. You figure out your costs — how much the lemonade costs, and the cups — and then you charge a little more than what it costs you, so you can make money. Then you can buy more stuff, and make more lemonade, and sell it and make more money.”

This is, of course, ridiculous. There’s no reason all lemonade stands need to be for-profit enterprises. Kids learn a variety of lessons from lemonade stands. Charging might teach valuable lessons about budgeting and self-sufficiency, but giving lemonade away can teach equally valuable lessons about generosity and public service. Savage apparently doesn’t care what the girls’ parents might have hoped their kids would get out of the experience. The mere fact that the girls were failing to conform to the neoclassical model of homo economicus was enough to condemn their activity.

That’s a frivolous example, to be sure, but the same mixture of intellectual laziness and arrogance crops up in more serious contexts. I’ve written before about this Richard Epstein column where he criticizes the free software movement for, basically, failing to conform to the assumptions of the neoclassical model:

The open source movement shares many features with a workers’ commune, and is likely to fail for the same reason: it cannot scale up to meet its own successes. To see the long-term difficulty, imagine a commune entirely owned by its original workers who share pro rata in its increases in value. The system might work well in the early days when the workforce remains fixed. But what happens when a given worker wants to quit? Does that worker receive in cash or kind his share of the gain in value during the period of his employment? If not, then the run-up in value during his period of employment will be gobbled up by his successor – a recipe for immense resentment. Yet that danger can be ducked only by creating a capital structure that gives present employees separable interests in either debt or equity in exchange for their contributions to the company.

This passage bears no relationship to reality. Free software projects scale up just fine without “a capital structure that gives present employees separable interests in either debt or equity.” Contributors are not employees or shareholders. The inability to cash out does not, in fact, generate “immense resentment.” And Epstein could have learned all of this pretty easily if he’d talked to a few people in the free software community before writing his column. But why let facts clutter up a perfectly good theory?

I sometimes get the same vibe when I talk to legal academics about software patents. Many software patent supporters in academia hail from the law-and-economics tradition, and they have a coherent neoclassical story about how patents create incentives for innovation in the software industry. The problem with the story is that it’s utterly at odds with how the software industry actually works. And they don’t seem to understand (or maybe they don’t care) why software patents have generated so much opposition among the people who are actually responsible for producing software innovation.

A humble, bottom-up thinker takes this kind of disconnect between economic theory and lived reality as a reason to re-think the theory—or even better, to learn about a domain before trying to theorize about it. A top-down, “clean slate” thinker takes it as evidence that he needs to do a better job of explaining the theory to the uninitiated or, at worst, to tweak a few of the implementation details.

This “clean slate” vice isn’t unique to neoclassical thinkers by any means; all ideologies are prone to similar excesses. But I think Jed is right that abuses of neoclassical theory are pretty common. Precisely because the neoclassical model is such a powerful way to explain certain social phenomena, a lot of people have convinced themselves that it can be usefully applied to every problem. This isn’t a bad parlor game, but it’s a terrible way to do public policy.

A fantastic column by Gene Healy about our bloated new national security state:

The system vomits up some “50,000 intelligence reports each year — a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.” Details about December’s “underwear bomber” vanished amid that morass. In the needle-in-haystack fight to ferret out terrorists, we’ve wasted billions building a bigger haystack.

Our interminable war on terror sometimes seems designed to justify every bad thing libertarians have ever said about government. For example, it’s uncontested that the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques came from a training program adopted after Chinese communists tortured U.S. soldiers captured in Korea.

Morality aside, it’s almost impossible to imagine a dumber basis for fighting terror than adopting communist tactics designed to elicit false confessions. … Unless it’s the Hayekian nightmare of spending a trillion dollars and more than 5,000 American lives trying to create law-governed liberal democracies via military fiat.

Yet, it’s usually liberals who report these tales of federal idiocy, and conservatives who resent them for it. “The Washington Post finds waste-in government!” Mona Charen snarks about “Top Secret America.” “They seem much less curious” about waste and abuse elsewhere in government. A fair point, but one that cuts both ways.

But of course we know that deep down, only conservatives care about freedom and limited government.

A few years before her death, in 2000, Jane Jacobs gave a really fascinating interview with Jim Kunstler. It’s a long interview, but it’s packed with interesting ideas from a woman who was still in her intellectual prime well into her 80s. I was particularly struck by this passage about the Garden City movement, which was one of the major inspirations for the baleful urban planning trends of the 20th Century:

What was a really major bad idea about the Garden City was you take a clean slate and you make a new world. That’s basically artificial. There is no new world that you make without the old world. And [urban planning intellectual Lewis] Mumford fell for that and the whole “this is the twentieth century” thing. The notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one. This is what was so bad about Modernism.

The intellectual error that drove much of the bad urban planning decisions of the 20th century was to underestimate the value locked up in existing urban neighborhoods. People build complex networks of friends, families, and professional contacts that knit the city together and make it more than the sum of its parts. They make long-term investments in their homes and businesses on the assumption that those investments will pay off over decades. The form psychological attachments to people and places that can’t easily be replaced.

None of this value could be seen in the scale models and conceptual sketches that urban planners used to map out the future of urban neighborhoods. And so plans were made based on superficial engineering and aesthetic criteria. Tremendous damage was done by people who underestimated both the value of what they were destroying and the difficulty of building adequate “clean slate” replacements.

This is not, of course, an intellectual error that’s unique to urban planning. The same error can be seen in the Bush administration’s fantasy that we could transplant democracy to Iraq by force of arms. We quickly learned that there was no “clean slate” in Iraq; old animosities quickly re-asserted themselves, tens of thousands of people were killed, and millions had their lives turned upside down. A similar story can be told about the Vietnam War, which Jacobs strenuously opposed. (she wound up moving to Canada to ensure her sons would not be drafted)

F.A. Hayek drew an important distinction between two different strands of liberal thought, which he termed the “Continental” and “British” strains of liberalism:

The one tradition, much older than the name ‘liberalism’, traces back to classical antiquity and took its modern form during the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries as the political doctrines of the English Whigs. It provided the model of political institutions which most of the European nineteenth‑century liberalism followed. It was the individual liberty which a ‘government under the law’ had secured to the citizens of Great Britain which inspired the movement for liberty in the countries of the Continent in which absolutism had destroyed most of the medieval liberties which had been largely preserved in Britain. These institutions were, however, interpreted on the Continent in the light of a philosophical tradition very different from the evolutionary conceptions predominant in Britain, namely of it rationalist or constructivistic view which demanded a deliberate reconstruction of the whole of society in accordance with principles of reason. This approach derived from the new rationalist philosophy developed above all by René Descartes (but also by Thomas Hobbes in Britain) and gained its greatest influence in the eighteenth century through the philosophers of the French Enlightenment. Voltaire and J.‑J. Rousseau were the two most influential figures of the intellectual movement that culminated in the French Revolution and from which the Continental or constructivistic type of liberalism derives. The core of this movement, unlike the British tradition, was not so much a definite political doctrine as a general mental attitude, a demand for an emancipation from all prejudice and all beliefs which could not be rationally justified, and for an escape from the authority of ‘priests and kings’. Its best expression is probably B. de Spinoza’s statement that ‘he is a free man who lives according to the dictates of reason alone’.

In the 20th century, of course, this intellectual error led to the horrors of communism. The problem with trying to make society conform with reason is that society is a lot more complicated than most planners realize. So what looks on paper like a perfectly rational social order—8-lane freeways, US-imposed democracy in Iraq, the dictatorship of the proletariat—turns out to have fatal flaws when put into practice. This is why wise policymakers recognize that their knowledge is limited, and take a pragmatic, incremental approach that improves peoples’ lives without turning them upside down.

A great comment by reader “Eric”:

The same barriers that supposedly keep crime out, are the same ones that concentrate it. At the end of the day, it doesn’t solve the problem. Furthermore (funny how the worm turns), now the residents of the all new Botanical Heights cast suspicions about our neighborhood – as if we’re now the problem (they have bigger fish to fry in Tiffany, to their east, IMO).

Lastly, to those who argue that simply suburbanizing and gentrifying neighborhoods is the answer to stabilizing cities – I would respectfully submit that such an approach is short sighted. Those folks who were displaced from McRee Town ended up in places like Benton Park West, Gravois Park, Dutchtown East and Mount Pleasant. Two of those four neighborhoods now rank as South City’s most dangerous. And, the stabilizing neighborhoods next to them (Tower Grove East, Benton Park, Carondelet) are faced with the same dilemma once shared by those of us in Shaw and Southwest Garden.

Leveling McRee Town solved the Botanical Garden’s immediate problem, which was that there was a slum next door. But it actually exacerbated St. Louis’s long-term problem: the shortage of safe neighborhoods for low-income people to live in.

Last week I argued that driving freeways through the heart of urban neighborhoods can have devastating effects. In case you’re skeptical about that claim, consider the case of McRee Town, a St. Louis neighborhood not far from the Forest Park Southeast neighborhood I mentioned in my earlier post.

The River Front Times did a great story on the decline of McRee Town in 2003:

Flora Place, Magnolia Avenue and Tower Grove Place have always been pillars of stability for the Shaw and Southwest Garden neighborhoods. Although some of Shaw’s streets are notoriously rough — a police officer was shot last year in the 3800 block of Shenandoah — it has managed to attract a fair share of rehabbers who are pushing property values upward. Until 1973, McRee Town and an area to the east called Tiffany were vibrant parts of the Shaw neighborhood. That changed when Interstate 44 was completed and the two neighborhoods were severed from the stability of Shaw’s garden and the elegant homes that surround it.

“When I moved here, we had a drugstore, we had a laundromat. We had a Baskin-Robbins at 39th near McRee,” recalls Norma Cox, who bought her home on Lafayette Avenue in 1976. She remembers the day the city blocked the underpass at Thurman Avenue so that traffic could not pass between Shaw and McRee Town. “That’s when I knew we were cut off,” she says.

The same conditions that make for an economically successful urban neighborhood also make for a safe neighborhood. A steady flow of pedestrian traffic makes a street safer, because criminals don’t want to be confronted by passers-by. Neighborhoods with many successful businesses tend to be safer, because business owners tend to be proactive about dealing with troublemakers in the vicinity of their properties.

When I-44 divided McRee Town from the rest of Shaw, it undermined these basic preconditions for safe neighborhoods. Foot traffic between the two neighborhoods plummeted. Because it was smaller, the McRee Town side suffered disproportionately from the loss. The fall in foot traffic meant that the neighborhood couldn’t support as many businesses at it had before. The drug store and the Baskin-Robbins closed.

Soon people who had a choice started leaving. The neighborhood rapidly deteriorated, and by the late 1980s the neighborhood was one of the city’s most notorious slums. Drug dealers moved in. Crime skyrocketed. Houses were abandoned.

Today there’s no neighborhood called McRee Town. Officials from the nearby Botanical Garden hatched a plan to level McRee Town and replace it with suburban-style detached single-family homes. The RFT did its story in 2003, just before the demolitions began in earnest. By the time I left St. Louis in 2008, it looked like a patch of suburbia had been transplanted into the city.

The Garden accomplished its immediate objective, which was to remove a nearby eyesore. But this kind of slash-and-burn redevelopment evades the city’s problems rather than addressing them. Botanical Heights will be nicer than McRee Town mostly because the new homes will be too expensive for the old residents to afford. The old residents were given relocation assistance, but in the long run they’re fighting for a dwindling supply of affordable housing, as the city steadily demolishes low-income neighborhoods and replaces it with suburban-style single-family homes that are out of reach for their former residents.

In the long run, it’s not clear that Botanical Heights will fare any better than McRee Town did. The fundamentals of the neighborhood haven’t changed. It’s still a long, narrow neighborhood sandwiched between railroad tracks and a freeway. The low density of the new housing means that it’s even less likely to sustain the foot traffic and neighborhood businesses that help ward off crime. And the state has apparently been flirting with making the neighborhood even more isolated by completely sealing up the underpasses that connect it to the other side of I-44. Once the new-house smell fades, Botanical Heights could easily begin to deteriorate in the same way that McRee Town did.