Bottom-up

As I mentioned last week, I’ve installed Envolve, the software that provides the Facebook-style chat you should see at the lower-right hand corner of your browser window, on the blog. I’ll be around this evening, 9-10 PM Eastern (6-7 PM Pacific), to chat with Bottom-up readers. Please drop by and say hello.

A number of bloggers have gotten into a debate about the merits of tenure. I think the discussion has been hampered by a misunderstanding of what universities do and why tenure is important. Yes, tenure sometimes protects professors who hold unpopular political views, but that’s not the primary justification for its existence. Rather, the existence of tenure, and the peculiar structure of universities more generally, is an adaptation to the distinctive task universities perform.

Universities exist to produce and disseminate theoretical knowledge, which has three distinctive characteristics that make the unusual structure of the modern university necessary. First, it’s hard for outsiders to judge the quality of work within any given discipline. You can judge the skill of a mechanic by seeing whether your car works when he’s done with it, but good luck evaluating a physics paper if you’re not a physicist.

Second, academic research consists of long-term projects with hard-to-predict returns. The typical academic paper is never read by more than a few dozen people, but every once in a while an academic discovers something like packet-switched networking or public-key cryptography that change the world. Even experts within a given discipline can’t predict which lines of research will prove fruitful or how long the process will take, so it’s important that individual professors have broad latitude to pursue the projects of their choice, even if those projects don’t look promising to others.

Finally, there is little correlation between the quality of academic work and its value in the marketplace. There’s never going to be a significant commercial market for Egyptology services. If we want a smart 25-year-old to become Egyptologists, we need to give him some reason to believe that he’ll be able to earn a living as an Egyptologist 40 years later.

This presents something of a paradox. On the one hand, the importance of local knowledge and experimentation suggests that universities should be structured in a bottom-up fashion. On the other hand, it seems that only a large, centralized institution can provide that long-term stability required to support academic research. To put it in Coasean terms: neither a conventional firm nor a conventional market is well-adapted to supporting academic research.

Universities are best seen as a third form of social organization, distinct from both the firm and the market. Like a top-down firm, a university has a centralized administrative staff to take care of routine functions like payroll, maintenance, course scheduling, and so forth. But unlike a firm (and like a market), the most important decisions within a university are made in a bottom-up fashion. Universities are divided into dozens of departments that choose their own leaders. They make decisions about hiring, promotion, and coursework with minimal interference from the administration. And within the department, faculty members have a great deal of autonomy to decide what they’ll teach and what kind of research they’ll do.

In traditional top-down institutions, people work to impress their bosses. In universities, people ignore their “bosses” (the Dean, university president, etc) and instead work hard to impress other people in their field, almost all of whom are at other institutions. Tenure is essential to preserving this bottom-up structure. If a university president had the power to fire professors, then she’d have the de facto ability to wield power in other respects as well. People with power usually can’t resist using it, so over time, power would shift toward the center and the school would be subject to all the flaws of traditional top-down at institutions. Professors would feel pressure to do things that look like good research to the non-experts in the corner office, which is a different thing from actually doing good research.

It’s absolutely true that the bottom-up structure of a university is expensive. Granting tenure to a sub-par professor means that the university is stuck with deadwood for decades. But the distinctive character of academic knowledge means this doesn’t matter very much. Only a tiny minority of scholars will produce truly ground-breaking research, and there’s no good way to predict who they are. And the most successful scholars tend to have high levels of self-motivation: neither threatening them with firing nor enticing them with large bonuses is likely to increase their odds of having a breakthrough. The best you can do is give them absolute job security and a minimum of distractions, so they can devote their full attention to their work.

Now, I haven’t said very much about undergraduates. This is mostly because educating undergrads just isn’t the primary focus of the kind of university where tenure is most important. At a place like Princeton, hiring and tenure decisions are primarily focused on an applicant’s research record. This turns out not to be such a bad deal for Princeton undergraduates because the kind of high-caliber undergrad who get in to Princeton doesn’t need a lot of hand-holding anyway. What they get instead is the chance to learn about the latest developments in their major from leading scholars in the field.

My experience is limited to large research institutions (my undergraduate alma mater is the University of Minnesota), so I’m not sure how well these arguments apply to to liberal arts and community colleges where research isn’t a major focus. In settings where educating undergraduates is the institution’s primary mission, the case against tenure may be stronger. Still, even in institutions focused on undergraduate education, the decentralization that tenure makes possible has important advantages. Just as segregating the editorial side of a newspaper from the business side is good for the long-term profitability of a news organization, so making the faculty independent of the administration prevents the administration from meddling in the educational process in ways that might harm the institution’s long-run reputation. When the people creating the curriculum are independent of the people making budgetary decisions, there will be much less temptation to deal with short-term budget problems by lowering standards or otherwise cutting corners. Granting tenure to your professors is a way of credibly committing to being the kind of place that takes scholarship seriously, and in the long run that’s extremely important.

One of the things I find really interesting about urban planning issues is that each city has its own unique story. I’ve mostly drawn my examples from Washington DC, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and New York because those are the cities I’ve lived in recently. But you can find similar stories in cities across the country. Here are some examples pointed out by readers.

D Magazine writer Wick Allison points to this post about the damage I-30 did in Dallas:

In 1964, when traffic engineers were even more ignorant about how cities work than they are today, the state completed I-30 by building the present elevated roadway. By that time, blacks had filled in the streets around Fair Park as Jews had moved to newer neighborhoods in North Dallas. In 1964, no black leaders had the political muscle to stop an elevated freeway from segregating their neighborhood from the rest of the city. So the freeway was built, an act of unthinking institutional racism that rammed a barrier through Dallas’ most historic neighborhoods.

The Conversation About Dallas Begins With Smart Criticism
What Henderson Avenue’s Rebirth Says About the Future of Dallas
The elevated freeway created poverty on both sides of the divide. Mansions on Munger and Second were cut up into apartments and boarding rooms. Only heroic action saved the blocks of Swiss Avenue nearest Lakewood.

Chris Monnier points to this online bibliography of sources documenting the destruction of St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood to make room for I-94:

This predominantly African American neighborhood in St. Paul was displaced in the 1960s by freeway construction. In the 1930s, Rondo Avenue was at the heart of St. Paul’s largest Black neighborhood. African-Americans whose families had lived in Minnesota for decades and others who were just arriving from the South made up a vibrant, vital community that was in many ways independent of the white society around it. The construction of I-94 in the 1960s shattered this tight-knit community, displaced thousands of African-Americans into a racially segregated city and a discriminatory housing market, and erased a now-legendary neighborhood.

John Deever points to Boston’s Big Dig as a (very expensive) solution to the urban freeway problem. He also points to a project to add a normal city street over I-670 in Columbus:

The project (in the oval in the uppermost picture) started out, in the mind of the Ohio Highway Department as a simple widening of the I-670 as it rolls through Columbus, Ohio. But the adjoining neighborhoods put up a fight. (This is my casual from-a-distance understanding of what happened.)

The compromise proposed by some local genius was to make the new overpass (neccesitated by the wider freeway) into a city street by lining it with shops to “link rather than divide.” It is under construction now.

Here’s Monnier again:

I love that freeway cap in Columbus that is discussed in John’s link. Minneapolis sort of has a similar thing with the new Target Plaza, which covers part of I-394 and connects downtown to the new Twins baseball stadium (Target Field). I’d LOVE to see such a Columbus-style cap in Minneapolis to cover the awful I-94/I-35W trench just south of downtown. The trench separates downtown from the rest of the city, with the blocks just north and south of the trench being sort of dead and quiet despite the fact that they are within walking distance of downtown.

Finally, I want to endorse this comment from reader (and self-described “planner in the Chicago area”) pete-rock:

Lastly, it wasn’t simply and only “planners” who allowed freeways to lead to urban neighborhood distruction. In fact, it wasn’t even mostly planners. The main culprits: local politicians who wanted to have interstate highways cut through their cities so they could control patronage construction jobs. Traffic engineers whose only concern was to design roads to move cars as swiftly as possible from one side of town to the other, without regard to neighborhood impact. A real estate industry that was looking to extract value from decimated urban neighborhoods as well as farmland sites. “Planners” helped make it happen, no doubt, but they were only facilitating the wishes of the power structure.

The problem here wasn’t so much that any specific group of people hated cities. Rather, the problem is that the top-down decision-making process that produced the constructions plans failed to properly take into account the interests of those whose homes and neighborhoods were slated for destruction. The important point isn’t to apportion blame, but rather to figure out how to undo the damage, and to make sure similar mistakes aren’t made in the future.

This week a number of my favorite liberal bloggers are tweeting and blogging from Netroots Nation, the annual conference for wired liberal activists. And as far as I can tell, there are no libertarians at the event. Certainly there don’t appear to be any on the agenda. And this isn’t due to a shortage of panels where libertarians could contribute. My colleague Dan Griswold would have been a great addition to this panel on immigration reform. My friend Julian Sanchez would have been a great pick for this panel on domestic surveillance issues. Cato chairman Bob Levy would have been an inspired choice for this panel on gay equality. And there’s this panel on drug reform, which mentions libertarians in the description, but doesn’t have any representatives of libertarian organizations among the panelists. It would be a natural place for my colleagues Tim Lynch or Radley Balko to speak. Yet I can’t find a single representative of a libertarian organization on any of the panels.

Compare that to the agenda for CPAC 10, which is probably the conservative counterpart to NN. I count at least eight speakers from explicitly libertarian groups like Cato, Reason, CEI, FFF, and the Institute for Justice, as well as many more from libertarian-friendly organizations like Freedom Works and Americans for Tax Reform.

My friend Adam Thierer says this is because “the Net Roots crowd is not interested in liberty.” I’ve already made clear what I think about that sentiment in general, but I think it’s particularly ironic coming from Adam. Adam is one of the libertarian movement’s leading First Amendment advocates. He has done a great job of building bridges with left-of-center groups like the Center for Democracy and Technology on free speech. If he gave a talk on First Amendment issues I bet he’d get a better reception from the NN crowd than the CPAC crowd.

So I don’t really get the hostility. It’s true, of course, that libertarians wouldn’t agree with everything they heard at NN. But the same is true of CPAC. Somehow, libertarian scholars and activists manage to promote liberty at CPAC despite the presence of the numerous theocrats, immigrant-bashers, warmongers, race-baiters, and the like. We could sit through a panel of statists talking about health care.

It’s this kind of grassroots disengagement, not the failure to craft a perfect liberaltarian manifesto, that makes a left-libertarian alliance seem far-fetched. And libertarians deserve a lot of the blame. Maybe if libertarian organizations regularly sent representatives to events like Netroots Nation, their organizers would be more likely to invite them to speak on their panels. Indeed, if libertarians were more involved in organizing events like Netroots Nation (as they are events like CPAC) they could nudge the agenda in a more libertarian direction, including more stuff on free speech or drug reform and suggesting more libertarian speakers.

Still, liberals could do more as well. Even if they think we’re troglodytes in general, it’s still useful to broaden the political coalition on specific issues where we agree. So in case any organizers of NN11 wind up reading this, a special note to them: email me! I know a lots of libertarians. Name a “social issue”—free speech, gay marriage, domestic surveillance, executive power, immigration, criminal justice, drug reform, foreign policy, feminism—and I can put you in touch with libertarians who can give crowd-pleasing talks on those subjects.

Third and Chestnut Streets, March 1, 1940, shortly before it was demolished to make room for what became the St. Louis Arch. Photograph from Landmarks' collection.

Jane Jacobs wrote Great American Cities in 1961, a time when elite opinion was almost uniformly hostile to the urban lifestyle. American policymakers at all levels of government pushed policies that undermined urban neighborhoods and pushed people into the suburbs.

St. Louis, where I lived between 2005 and 2008, is a textbook example. Consider the St. Louis Arch, which began as a Depression-era project to “revitalize” downtown St. Louis by leveling about 20 blocks of prime riverfront real estate to make room for a park. Not surprisingly, this plan drew fierce opposition from the people who were living and working in those 20 blocks. But the government used its power of eminent domain to take the properties over their objections. (As an aside: the Arch is formally the centerpiece of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. There’s something perversely fitting about the fact that thousands of people were forcibly evicted from their land to make room for a monument to commemorate the forcible eviction of Native Americans from their land.)

Anyway, after a few years of litigation, demolitions began in 1940. Then the project got bogged down in budget problems and more litigation, and so the area was used as a gigantic parking lot for two decades, before work on the arch finally began in 1963.

Meanwhile, work began on the urban portion of the Interstate Highway System. Planners in St. Louis, as in most American cities, decided that the new expressways would run directly through the cities’ downtowns. One of them (I-44/I-70) now runs North to South between the park and downtown. Not surprisingly, if you visit the park today you’ll find a light sprinkling of tourists, but nothing like the throngs of locals you’ll find in successful urban parks like New York’s Union Square, Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, or DC’s Dupont Circle. Whatever “revitalizing” effects the park might have had on the rest of the city were undermined by the fact that the park isn’t really accessible to pedestrians in the rest of the city.

Planners pursued the same basic scheme in other American cities. And in almost every case, they encountered fierce resistance from people already living where the freeways were supposed to go. Jacobs herself was a key player in the famous, and ultimately successful, effort to stop a proposed freeway through lower Manhattan. After decades of bitter conflict, similar plans were defeated in Washington, DC. Urbanists were partially successful in Philadelphia. They killed the Crosstown expressway, which would have cut through South Philly, but they failed to stop the Vine Street Expressway, which ran north of downtown and contributed to the destruction of Philly’s Chinatown.

Cities generate wealth by bringing large numbers of people into proximity with one another. Two adjacent high-density neighborhoods will be richer than either could be alone because businesses at the edge of each neighborhood will be enriched by pedestrian traffic from the other. Driving a freeway through the middle of a healthy urban neighborhood not only destroys thousands of homes, it rips apart tightly integrated neighborhoods. Pedestrians rarely walk across freeways, so businesses near a new freeway are immediately deprived of half their customers. Similarly, residents near a new freeway lose access to half the businesses near them. The area along the freeway becomes what Jacobs calls a “border vaccuum” and goes into a kind of death spiral: because it contains little pedestrian traffic, businesses there don’t succeed. And because there are no interesting businesses there, even fewer people go there, which hurts the sales of businesses further from the freeway. The harms from such a freeway extends for blocks on either side.

St. Louis was particularly hard hit by the freeway craze. The map at the left shows the area south of downtown, which three freeways (I-44, I-55, and I-64/40) carved up into small, atomized neighborhoods. The Soulard neighborhood, near the bottom of the map, is one of the few places in St. Louis that still fits Jacbos’s criteria for a successful urban neighborhood: it has short blocks, plenty of older buildings, and is high-density by St. Louis standards. But it’s too small to stand on its own, and the freeways have cut it off from adjacent neighborhoods to the North, West, and South.

Going further West, similar damage can be seen in the mile-wide strip of land between I-64/40 and I-44. For example, we can compare the Central West End, where I lived for two years, with the Forest Park Southeast neighborhood further South. Between them lies Barnes Jewish, the region’s premiere hospital. The CWE is one of the most prosperous neighborhoods in St. Louis and is the preferred location for young medical professionals working at Barnes Jewish and medical students at Washington University Medical School. In contrast, when I lived there Forest Park Southest was a slum. I’m sure the reasons for the neighborhood’s decline are complex, but it certainly doesn’t help that I-64/40 runs between it and the hospital.

Carving up St. Louis with freeways didn’t just undermine individual neighborhoods, it permanently changed the region’s culture. By undermining walkable urban neighborhoods while simultaneously making it easier to commute in from the suburbs, planners effected a massive transfer of wealth from from cities to suburbs. It’s not surprising that many people responded to these incentives by moving to the suburbs. But it was hardly a voluntary choice.

My brother is an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, and he’s recently launched a neat new tool called Envolve, which offers in-browser chatting capabilities for any website. I’ve installed it here on the blog, and will be online for the next couple of hours. If you read this before 10 PM Eastern/7 PM Pacific, please stop by and say hello!

Update: Thanks to everyone who stopped by. My brother is still squashing a few last-minute bugs, so if anyone tried to stop by and wasn’t able to, please leave a comment and/or email me with details so I can forward them along to him.

If I did another evening chat, are there folks who would show up?

Nick Schulz weighs in on the liberaltarianism debate:

The original fusionist project of Frank Meyer and others was predicated on a belief that libertarians and conservatives (social/religious/paleo) actually agreed on some basic philosophical principles, not just shared goals such as opposing Soviet communism (as important as that was). Two of these have always been paramount: The importance of protecting individual liberty, and an appreciation for the vital role played by civil society and traditional mediating institutions that made American culture and ordered liberty possible.

This seems completely wrong to me. Conservatives care about “protecting individual liberty” for some people, but the conservative movement includes many people who are indifferent, if not hostile, to the liberty of foreigners, immigrants, drug users, gays and lesbians, women who want abortions, broadcasters, sex workers, criminal defendants, Muslims, publishers of pornography, atheists, and so forth. It’s true, of course, that you can compile a similar list (gun owners, business owners, etc) on the progressive side. But I see no reason to think the progressive list is longer, or that the people on that list are somehow more important, than the people on the conservative list.

What libertarians and conservatives share isn’t a shared commitment to freedom so much as a common way of talking about freedom. Conservatives and Republicans like to invoke the Founding Fathers, talk about free markets and limited government, quote Hayek, and so forth. But political rhetoric is a lagging indicator of ideological commitments. A lot of fusionist slogans have become so shopworn that they’re what Orwell called dead metaphors. The fact that they’re often combined with calls to “keep your government hands off my Medicare”, promote “energy independence”, and build a police state along our Southern border suggests that these slogans are little more than empty rhetoric. When the typical Republican politiician says he cares about limited government, his purpose isn’t so much to express support for a specific policy agenda (most of the Republican policy agenda involves expanding government) so much as to signal membership in the fusionist political coalition.

Because libertarians and conservatives share a political vocabulary we find it relatively easy to communicate with each other. Liberals and libertarians obviously “agree on some basic philosophical principles”—that’s why many libertarians still call themselves classical liberals. But many libertarians talk about liberty in a right-wing way that most liberals find off-putting. And liberals, for their part, talk about liberty in a way that’s alien to most libertarians. This “language barrier” exaggerates the degree of disagreement between us. Without a shared vocabulary, it’s challenging for liberals and libertarians to recognize and build on areas of shared agreement.

This is why I think it’s important for this kind of debate to move beyond manifestos to actually discovering and working on areas of shared agreement. Conservatives and libertarians feel an emotional bond because libertarians spend most of their time working on “conservative” issues, not the other way around. To develop a similar rapport with liberals, libertarians need to focus more on issues where they can count liberals as allies. As they do, they’ll find that there are actually lots of liberals who care about freedom, they just talk about it in a different way than conservatives (and most libertarians) do.

Jane Jacobs’s final criterion for successful urban neighborhoods was the existence of aged buildings:

If you look about, you will see that only operations that are well established, high-turnover, standardized, or heavily subsidized can afford, commonly, to carry the costs of new construction. Chain stores, chain restaurants and banks go into new construction. But neighborhood bars, foreign restaurants, and pawn shops go into older buildings. Supermarkets and shoe stores often go into new buildings; good bookstores and antique dealers seldom do. Well-subsidized opera and art museums often go into new buildings. But the unformalized feeders of the arts—studios, galleries, stores for musical instruments and art supplies, backrooms where te low earning power of a seat and a table can absorb uneconomic discussions—these go into old buildings. Perhaps more significant, hundreds of ordinary enterprises, necessary to the safety and public life of streets and neighborhoods, and appreciated for their convenience and personal quality, can make out successfully in old buildings, but are inexorably slain by the high overhead of new construction.

As for really new ideas of any kind—no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be—there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

This, of course, is exactly parallel to the argument for disruptive technologies: lowering costs increases experimentation. When the inputs to entrepreneurship fall, you get more entrepreneurs. And more importantly, you get different kinds of entrepreneurs. High rents often require entrepreneurs to raise outside capital, which means the entrepreneur can only open the kind of business he can persuade someone else to finance. Low rents allow entrepreneurs to cover more of the cost out-of-pocket, which means they can take bigger risks.

This seems to be the only one of Jacobs’s four rules that holds as well in the suburbs as it does in the city. Tyler Cowen has observed that the best ethnic restaurants in the DC area tend to be in the suburbs, where, as he puts it, “The best ethnic restaurants are often found in suburban strip malls, where rents are lower and the degree of feasible experimentation is greater. Small and cheap ethnic restaurants are often better than large ones.” Presumably, when Jacobs was writing, in 1961, there would have been very few old buildings in the suburbs. A half-century later, old suburban buildings are more common, while urban real estate in some metro areas (including DC) has gotten significantly more expensive. So this particular advantage of urban living isn’t as large as it used to be.

As I’ve re-read Great American Cities this summer, I’ve found that the examples in the book are clearer now that I’ve spent a few months each in Philadelphia and New York, two of the cities Jacobs uses for many of her examples.

My wife and I have an apartment in the Passyunk Square neighborhood of South Philadelphia. One of the most striking features of my neighborhood is the high concentration of city streets. The major streets are spaced about 450 feet apart in both the North-South and East-West direction. This would make for relatively short blocks all by itself, but most blocks are further subdivided by one or two side streets, meaning that most city blocks are actually rectangles 450 feet long and 150 to 200 feet wide, like so:

Compare that to Hell’s Kitchen, the neighborhood I’m staying in in New York this summer, shown here on the same scale as the map above:

The contrast is dramatic. Blocks in Hell’s Kitchen are roughly 900 by 300 feet. This seemingly minor difference of geography has a huge effect on the neighborhood’s character. I live in a high-rise apartment building, and my block has only slightly more personality than a cluster of airport hotels. At the base of my building is a bowling alley, a generic restaurant, and small convenience store, but the rest of the block consists mostly of the facades of other large apartment buildings. On the route from my apartment to my subway stop on 8th Ave, I pass a lot of parking garages, chain stores, banks, and the bare facades of large buildings.

If you turn and walk up a North-South street, you experience the opposite problem. These streets get a lot more foot traffic, and as a consequence they have a lot of shops and restaurants. So many, in fact, that there’s not much space for anything else. Indeed, as you get closer to the middle of the city, the North-South streets can become completely clogged with pedestrians (even before you hit the tourists in Times Square) even as the East-West streets continue to be relatively deserted. In a sense, long blocks tend to segregate residential and commercial uses, with the former in the middles of blocks and the latter at the ends.

Our Philadelphia neighborhood is very different. Because blocks are so short, businesses are pretty uniformly distributed throughout our neighborhood. There’s a bodega about 150 feet from our apartment, and half a dozen other convenience stores within 5 minute’s walking distance. There are several bars and restaurants within a block of us, as well as a sizeable fish market and small cobbler.

Even though the neighborhood has a high density of businesses, it doesn’t feel like a particularly commercial neighborhood. The average business is relatively small and surrounded by residential properties. Because they don’t have to jostle for precious space along the few high-traffic corridors, they seem to do a better job of blending in with the surrounding residences.

Short blocks provide pedestrians with many possible routes to get between any two points. And this fact helps to explain the uniform distribution of businesses. First, there aren’t really specific “high traffic” streets. Because the streets are closely spaced in both directions, a business can locate at any one of the neighborhood’s many corners and expect to see a modest but steady flow of foot traffic.

More importantly, short streets generate greater diversity of traffic. A business on 42nd St between 9th and 10th Ave in Manhattan will basically only get traffic from people who work or live on 42nd St. People on 41st or 43rd St. don’t have much reason to go there, and it’s inconvenient to do so. This means that the set of people who might discover that business is sharply limited. In contrast, a business at the corner of 12th St. and Tasker St. in Philadelphia will draw foot traffic from a much wider area. Because people can take varied routes, there will be a much higher proportion of first-time passers-by (a.k.a. potential new customers) for a given volume of foot traffic.

In other words, short blocks enhance the bottom-up discovery process that is the foundation of urban wealth creation. They create more good business locations per square mile and cause more potential new customers to walk past them.

Ilya Somin has another thoughtful post about the prospects for a liberaltarian movement:

The range of issues where libertarians and liberals genuinely agree is narrower than Lee assumes. Most liberals do not in fact agree with libertarians on civil liberties, the war on drugs, and gay rights. Certainly, both groups decry many conservative policies on these issues. But they don’t really agree on the alternatives to them. On civil liberties, for example, many liberals favor hate speech laws, restrictions on political speech by corporations, wide-ranging sexual harrassment laws that infringe on freedom of speech, and so forth. On gay rights, libertarians favor laissez-faire, while liberals tend to favor antidiscrimination laws that restrict the freedom of private organizations. On the War on Drugs, only a minority of liberals favor anything close to the full-blown legalization advocated by libertarians. Foreign policy, of course, is an issue that divides both liberals and libertarians among themselves.

The conservative-libertarian free market think tanks Lee points to succeed because the conservatives and libertarians there agree not only on rejecting liberal economic policies but also on an affirmative agenda of severely restricting government’s role in the economy. It would be much more difficult to run an economic policy think tank that brought together libertarians with “compassionate conservatives” who want to replace liberal economic interventions with conservative ones.

I’m confused by this because the situations seem pretty parallel to me. As Somin acknowledges, there are lots of right-wingers, “compassionate conservatives” included, that aren’t interested in any part of the libertarian policy agenda. I can’t remember the last time the Family Research Council published something I agreed with, even on “economic issues.” I think Pat Buchanan’s views on “economic issues” are appalling.

Fusionist organizations deal with these elements of the conservative movement by mostly ignoring them. They don’t write about their work. They don’t hire their employees or publish their scholars’ work. And instead, they work with people in the more free-market-friendly corners of the conservative world. On the margin, this raises the prominence of the free-market parts of the conservative agenda relative to the non-free-market parts. And over time, conservatives have increasingly come to see the libertarian vision of economic policy as the conservative economic policy agenda.

The distribution of opinions on the liberal side is similar. Common Cause doesn’t see eye-to-eye with libertarians on First Amendment issues. The ACLU largely does. And so a liberaltarian organization would hire ACLU-style liberals rather than Common-Cause-style liberals to work on First Amendment issues. And on the margin, this would raise the prominence of ACLU-style First Amendment advocacy relative to Common-Cause-style First Amendment advocacy within the liberal movement. You can tell a similar story on gay rights, the drug war, immigration, and other issues. The liberal movement is not monolithic; on each of these issues you’ll find some parts of the liberal movement like what libertarians have to say and others where they don’t. A liberaltarian organization would build relationships with the libertarian-friendly parts of the liberal movement on each of these issues, thereby nudging the liberal movement in a more libertarian direction on these issues.

The only reason this seems more awkward on the left is that the project is much further along on the right. People who are “in the trenches” together tend to see their views converge over time. People who are used to glaring at each other across the barricades tend to have their views diverge over time. So after a half-century of fusionism, conservatives and libertarians are used to taking each others’ arguments seriously especially on “economic issues. In contrast, a half-century of thinking of each other as being on opposite ends of the political spectrum has accustomed liberals and libertarians to dismissing each others arguments out of hand, even on “social issues.” But that asymmetry is largely a result of the fusionist alliance, it’s not a deep fact about political philosophy. And although path-dependency is a powerful force, there’s no reason it needs to be a permanent feature of the American political landscape.