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Confession - I am a NIMBY (Part 1/2)
There, I said it. In the circles that I reside in, calling someone a “nimby” comes with a clearly negative connotation, such a strong negative connotation that it stands alone as an argument in favor of any given development or policy change. To make sure that I’m thinking clearly and not just embracing the term because I’m a contrarian (although I am admittedly a contrarian), I turned to Wikipedia to make sure I had a sound working definition:
Well, now that I’ve got a clear definition, yes, that’s exactly me. I support good things in my neighborhood and I’m against bad things in my neighborhood. I even embrace the implied hypocrisy of saying that I don’t care if other people want to have bad things in their neighborhoods, it’s really up to them whether they accept or refuse those things. In the event that such a thing is truly necessary for both neighborhoods to succeed and that one of us must accept the bad thing, I embrace Coaseian negotiated handling of the externalities.
Let’s move on to some concrete examples of my nimbyism. The first one that pops to mind are the frequent local proposals for homeless shelters, family shelters, and similar structures and aid organizations. One of my best friends used to live in a condo that was seated next door to one of these, which gave them a rather first-hand and literal application of what it means to say, “yes in my backyard” to this sort of project, and it was about as unpleasant as you’d expect. The frequency of parking lot fights, ambulances in the middle of the night, and police presence were, again, about you might expect. Without regard to whether such organizations are actually helpful or not, should I want to accept such a similar proposed structure in my backyard? The answer that I give is a fervent no, that inviting the indigent to my neighborhood will make it a worse place to live in just about every conceivable way. I want indigent populations removed from my neighborhood as soon as practicable and legal for the police to do so, for the incredibly obvious reason that this makes my neighborhood a better place to live. Some people feel quite differently from me on this - perfect! Since I don’t want drug addicts and crazy people in the park across the street and others say they don’t mind, we have a Pareto optimal solution. If they actually do feel that there is a cost, we’ll have to come to some sort of Coaseian handling of externalities, but I’ll at least have extracted the concession that it actually does suck to have hobos in your park.
Moving on to one that’s a little less plain to see and that is even more galling to those that think the nimbies must be stopped, let’s talk a bit about housing density. Madison currently faces a housing crunch, caused by economic opportunity and geographic constraints. The city has an unusual abundance of high-skill job prospects as the state’s capitol, home to a large and prestigious university, and large software and biotechnology sectors that have spun off of that university. Geographically, the heart of the city is the largest American city situated on an isthmus, just about one mile wide, running between a picturesque pair of lakes. The city has an ordinance protecting the prominence of the state capitol building, keeping the overall aesthetic of the skyline as it has been. It is also famously tedious to deal with when it comes to historical preservation; if you’d like to enjoy some ridiculousness, check out this recent argument about a bar that Al Capone apparently went to. As a result of these factors, that slice of land is a surprisingly expensive place to live for the Midwest.
Despite the prices, I elected to settle here anyway and I really do love this city. I love the beauty of the city, the historic skyline, the lakes, the biking, the fitness culture, the breweries, the cheese, the parks, the huge farmer’s market, and much more. I even love that it’s the kind of place that a fake Indian nonbinary lunatic would set up shop for fun and profit.Others in my city share that love, but think it should be a cheaper place to live, that we should increase housing density, and this is basically a human right. One recent opinion piece on this has a decent enough piece on a rather villainous and peculiar bit of law here:
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Here’s where I bite the bullet and go full nimby - yes! I am in favor of exactly that in my neighborhood. I want to live next to married couples with decent careers. My experiences with poor people and the transiently coupled have shown me that they’re lower quality neighbors. Even aside from trustworthiness, transience, investment in the property, and quality of friends and relatives, we simply don’t share the same cultural norms and preferences. I would rather be around the petit bourgeois. Back to the distinction between being a nimby and having a broader policy recommendation though - I don’t care if someone else in some other neighborhood would like to get rid of this sort of restriction, it’s not like I have some moral prohibition on there being poor people with roommates, I would just rather that my neighbors be a nice married couple that is going to stick around a while. I’ll even cop to the even more villainous take that I rather like the high property values here in part because they serve as an effective barrier against living around the kind of people I don’t want to live around.
Confession - I am a NIMBY (Part 2/2)
Zooming out to a somewhat ridiculous degree, I find that I extend my position on this all the way up and down the ladder of my preferences and politics. When I consider immigration, for example, it’s not that I’m against all immigration to my country or that I think other countries should necessarily restrict free flow of movement, it’s that I want my nation’s policy to reflect what will be good for our (rather large) neighborhood. We should identify what is good for our neighborhood and choose to do that. In the event that cooperation with other neighborhoods is required, we should sort this out by negotiations to price externalities. There are going to be some pretty obvious agreements about what’s good for the neighborhood and these disagreements can occur between reasonable and well-meaning people, but we’re going to have a tough time getting the terms of debate to even begin to make sense if we can’t agree on whether the improvement of our neighborhood is the priority.
In all of these cases, the counterargument, as I understand it, is that while these things might be good for the current residents of my neighborhood, they’re not good for the potential future residents of my neighborhood. This is where I find it difficult to rebut the argument on its own terms, as it is evidently coming from a perspective of utilitarianism with little or no discount as one moves out the concentric ring of association. I don’t share that perspective and feel little or no responsibility to make my neighborhood more accessible to those that aren’t presently members.
In pondering this a bit yesterday, the part that I find most interesting in the efficacy of “nimby” as a sneer word against an opposing position. How did it come to be that even people that hold fundamentally nimby positions mostly recoil from being called nimbies? I think I found something like an answer in a recent Reddit thread on the putative housing shortage in Madison:
I think that’s it - progressivism demands the sort of egalitarianism that precludes one from saying that their backyard holds any particular value to them relative to other backyards. If something is good, then it must be good everywhere, which means that you must accept it in your backyard. Opposition to development is (correctly, I think) identified as anti-egalitarian, hierarchical, and classist.
In any case, I expect that people will continue to want good things in their neighborhood and not want bad things in their neighborhood. I hope that they regain the inclination to reply simply, “not in my backyard”.
It sounds like you've narrowed down to a specific value difference. While NIMBY isn't particularly strongly associated with conservatism/Republicans in the US (although, the left is often calling out liberals/Democrats, too), I often see people on the left asserting the strawman that the conservative worldview is "I've got mine, screw you." or the related "I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People" (I haven't actually seen that article before, but I've certainly seen the line repeated on Twitter a lot; scrolling down, that article also contains "I’ve got mine, so screw you").
I'm not sure there's much to gain by discussing further. You've found the fundamental values difference. Except maybe the YIMBY side could come up with arguments that your positions are actually somehow counterintuitively working against that value, but that seems unlikely. I guess there's the problem cited elsewhere in this thread that if you want businesses near you staffed with low-paid service workers, then those workers have to be able to afford housing of some sort vaguely nearby.
I have to admit, I don't care about other people as a general rule.
I care about some people: my wife and kids, my parents and siblings, close friends, social circle, coworkers (in descending order). Outside of that I care about people based on the value they bring. That can be direct value, e.g. the mailman who delivers packages, or indirect value, e.g. the people working at USPS's sorting center.
But I don't care at all about the people who bring negative net value. The homeless guy drugged out of his mind? If he died tomorrow I literally wouldn't feel sad at all. The single mother welfare-leech churning out 4 kids? Nope. Sam Bankman-Fried and his mother (who I consider her the upper-class equivalent of a welfare-leech)? Gone. Just fucking Thanos snap hordes of inner-city gangs and Women's Studies majors away.
I not only don't care about them, I fundamentally don't understand why people do. Does human life have intrinsic value? Yeah, some. But surely we all agree -- not that much right? Or else you would take all the money out of your bank account, go to one of the slums in India, and start saving lives left right and center at maybe $100 a pop? And at least that little kid in the slum has the potential to be the next Srinivasa Ramanujan, whereas the 65 year old homeless drunk who shows up to the ER every two weeks has no chance?
(Obviously this is not to say that I want those people removed -- that sets a dangerous precedent because who decides?)
Law professors at stanford are 'the upper-class equivalent of a welfare leech'?
"Surely we can all agree - we don't have THAT much responsibility to the environment, right? Otherwise we'd have to stop using lead paint, leaded gasoline, maybe stop dumping oil into rivers - and, wow, what a mess that'd be."
What even is this argument? Surely if going to india and 'saving lives at 100/pop' (givewell estimates it at $5k) isn't worth doing, it is so because of ... some aspect of those lives or what saving them entails, and not because we're not already doing it.
The difference is that saving the environment requires a coordinated action, but saving a kid in India does not. Any modestly well-off person from the U.S. can do it. So the fact that they don't is a revealed preference (vs. just a consequence of tragedy of the commons).
EAs use this contradiction to convince people to do more (by pointing out what you would do for someone in front of you). I don't have this contradiction -- I wouldn't do shit for many people in front of me either.
And yes, I stand by my assessment of Barbara Fried. Instead of passing a drug test to demonstrate purity of body, upper-class welfare leeches must pass a similar test put together by a granting agency to demonstrate purity of mind.
Here's her bibliography: https://law.stanford.edu/publications/?primary_author=Barbara%20Fried&page=1
... okay, and the revealed preference of conservatives and reactionaries is that they love porn. this doesn't tell us that porn is good the interesting claim isn't "do most normal people do X", because ... they're normal people, many just imitate what their friends or family or media does, some come up with their own ideas which aren't any better, the interesting claim is "is X worth doing". If the amount of value something has is determined solely by how much other people, at the present moment, value it - i guess handwashing in hospitals was valueless until semmelweis.
Those publications aren't inspiring at a glance, but they're probably better philosophy than the 75th percentile philosophy paper. And she spent a lot of time teaching law too (apparently they both stopped teaching after FTX) - which isn't particularly parasitic. I'm not gonna look too deeply into this, but even if she has much more prestige than she should for a law school teacher, that's hardly welfare leech
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