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When reading Is Seattle a 15-minute city? this morning, I couldn't help thinking about what's missing from it. For context, the 15-minute city is an urbanist idea about making every residential area a 15-minute walk to important amenities like grocery stores. It's a good idea if it could be achieved without incurring too many other costs, and it's the other costs that I couldn't help thinking about. Specifically, crime.
The metric "walking time to the nearest supermarket" I'm sure correlates closely to rate of property crimes. Where I live, homeless encampments tend to spring up close to grocery stores. These things are related.
I'm very sympathetic to concerns about car dependence, and how much better life could be if housing was built closer to stores, schools, and workplaces. But the problem is always crime. Requiring a car to get to a place disproportionately screens out would-be criminals, even if it also screens out some upstanding citizens who cannot or will not drive. Suburbia is the epitome of this phenomenon, where everything is too far from anything else to live without a car. In cities that are naturally denser, there are constant fights over zoning that dance around this issue but don't address it directly (at least when the participants are nominally progressive and need to be seen as non-discriminatory).
There's a more general point here, which is this: discrimination is required for a well-functioning society. I'm using 'discrimination' in the more technical sense here, as "To make a clear distinction; distinguish." The concept of statistical discrimination covers a lot of what I mean here, but discrimination based on signaling is important too.
Statistical discrimination is basically using Bayesian inference, using information that's already available or easy to get, to make inferences about hidden or illegible traits that predict some important outcome. In the context of walkability, people who don't own cars are more likely to commit crimes or to be bad customers and neighbors than people who do own cars. So you end up with a better-behaving local population if you require a car.
By discrimination based on signaling I mean things like choice of clothing, personal affect and mannerism, accent, vocabulary, presence of tattoos, etc. These things are useful for statistical discrimination, but they're under conscious control of the person in question, and they're hard to fake. They basically prove "skin in the game" for group membership. It takes time and effort to develop a convincing persona that will get you accepted into a different social class, and higher social classes have much stricter standards of behavior. Basically the guy speaking in Received Pronunciation, with no tattoos, who uses PMC vocabulary and dresses in upper-middle-class business attire is very unlikely to rob you, because it would be very costly to him. He'd lose his valuable class status for doing something so base.
Why is discrimination required for a well-functioning society? Because every choice is almost by definition discriminatory, and preferentially making positive-sum choices leads to a positive-sum society. Imagine if you made zero assumptions about a new person you met, aside from "this is a human." You wouldn't be able to talk to them (you'd be assuming their language), you wouldn't know what kind of etiquette to use, you'd have no idea whether they're going to kill you for doing something they consider obscene; you wouldn't be able to get any value out of the interaction. If instead you inferred based on their appearance that they're a middle-class elderly American woman who speaks English, you could immediately make good choices about what to talk about with them.
I'm sure this is all pretty obvious to anyone rationalist-adjacent, but I had a confusing conversation with a more left-leaning relative recently who seemed to have internalized a lot of the leftist ideas that are basically of the form "statistical discrimination is useless." Setting aside topics outside the Overton window like HBD, even for questions like "does the fact that a person committed a crime in the past change the likelihood they'll commit a crime in the future, all else equal?" the assumption seemed to be "no." Michael Malice's assertion seems to be true, that answering "are some people better than others" is the most precise way to distinguish right-wing from left-wing.
Bringing this to the culture war, there is a scientific or factual answer to every question "does observable fact X predict outcome Y", and pointing out that leftist assumptions contradict the evidence is how to convince reasonable people that the leftist assumption is false. I'm speaking as a person living in one of the most left-leaning places in the country, so the false leftist assumptions are the ones that most harm my life. Rightist assumptions of course also contradict the evidence, but I don't have salient examples.
The astute observer will note that most of the leftist intellectual movement of the last 50 years is trying to poison the evidence (via ad hominem and other fallacious arguments). How can one improve the quality of evidence when the wills of so many high-status people are set against it?
P.S. I'm sorry for the emotional tone of this post. This community is the only place I have to talk about this and I appreciate your thoughts.
Slight tangent:
Aah Seattle.... my favorite city to complain about.
Seattle is one of those places, where the more you look, the weirder it gets. Nothing about the city makes sense, and it seems to find the least intuitive solution to every core problem facing it.
I'm leaving Seattle for NYC in 2 weeks, and could not be happier about it.
The 3 words that come to mind when you think of the Seattle landscape are :
Rainy
Hilly
Dark
So, you'd think that the infrastructure would be built to work around these 3 traits. NOPE. If anything, the city tries to pretend as if none of those exist and gaslights you for complaining about it.
It's the rainy, so you'd want covered indoor spaces for people to socialize in for the 9 months of the year. There are none. Maybe covered outdoor spaces ? None.
It's dark, so you'd there to be well lit central walkable streets so people feel safe when it is dark at 3pm outside. There are none. But, dark places means amazing nightlife right ? Nope. Everything closes at 9.30.
It is hilly, so you'd want a street-cars/funiculars for the worst hills right ? Nope. The 2 paltry streetcars follow some of the flattest terrain in town.
Now here is the hilarious thing, this wouldn't be that big an issue. Afterall, all of America is abysmally planned and it manages to get by just fine. Thing is, all of Seattle's problems become 10x worse once you add the right variable into the mix. Yes ofc, Homelessness. (plus the dilapidation, drugs and crime resulting from it)
Why can't we have warm-ish covered public spaces --> because homeless people.
Why does no one want to walk in dark, badly lit, cold, rainy downtown neighborhoods unlike Northern Europe with similar weather --> because meth crazed homeless people
Why does no one use public transit --> because drooling drugged out homeless people
But why does driving into downtown also suck --> because property crime : homeless people
Should we do anything to solve it. Maybe start with politely asking homeless people to move or telling Mr. Felony that 22 strikes are 22 too many ? (/s)
No, we show compassion. Because there is nothing as egalitarian as allowing thousands of people to steal, stalk, harass & assault people while they waste their life away on increasingly accessible drugs.
I refuse to buy this uniquely American association of "suburbia = soft discrimination through differential access = class war = signaling". In every well-connected European & Asian city, the rich & high-status live in the middle of the city. It is where all the subway lines are, it is where all the people are, it is easy to access and has everything you need within a tiny tiny walk.
You are correct in that discrimination is central to signaling class. But, using the world's most inefficient urban planning to facilitate this is a uniquely American (and associated fake countries that pretend they aren't vassal states).
It is that way in those cities because the authorities make it that way. We used to have dense urban cores that were safe, prosperous, and full of healthy communities. The authorities (loosely defined) destroyed them, often on purpose, and have made lasting commitments to prevent their regeneration. The story of how and why they did this is long, and despite being matters of public record, not widely known, but that explains the difference. We destroyed our communities, and committed ourselves to ruinous policies that preclude anything like them from arising again. Suburbia is not anyone's first plan, it's merely the workable option somewhat out of reach of the authorities' malign influence.
Could you provide links to this story, or at least provide a hint where to start looking? It seems worth knowing more about, if only so other countries can avoid the American issues.
As mentioned, it's a long story, but I can try to get you started. Some elements:
Desegregation/Blockbusting/"White Flight", and the mechanics thereof. @The_Nybbler links one history, I offer excerpts from another here. The short version is that desegregation failed on its own terms, injecting massive amounts of interracial violence into previously peaceful and prosperous communities, which the authorities completely failed to anticipate or respond to.
The housing projects. See the discussion of Pruitt-Igoe here. These occurred more or less contemporaneously to desegregation, and were likewise driven by Progressive social-engineering theories with the aim of creating peaceful, prosperous communities for the underclass. The result were, in the words of Spike Lee, "self-cleaning ovens."
Deinstitutionalization resulted in insane people living on the street, rather than in controlled environments.
De-criminalization and toleration of vagrancy allowed the homeless to become a long-term problem within communities.
These specific policies did fatal damage to the communities of most major American cities. With the communities destroyed, the social basis for reform and regeneration no longer existed, and so the problems became self-perpetuating, and have continued since. Attempted solutions to the problems created by the last attempted solutions have created significant problems of their own.
The damage of these policies was aggravated by a number of other social trends and interventions, which amplified the damage they did. In most cases, the harms disproportionately fell on minority and especially black communities.
No-fault divorce, which delivered few of the benefits its advocates claimed, and all the harms its opponents warned of.
The Sexual Revolution generally, which likewise failed to secure the benefits its advocates claimed, caused a whole host of problems in its own right, and is effectively irreversable.
Lax drug policies and the cultivation of a ineradicable drug culture. The war On Drugs is one of the go-to examples of systemic racism, ignoring the historical fact that harsher punishments for the drugs ravaging black communities was a policy explicitly demanded by those communities, in an attempt to control the damage flowing outward from the above policies.
Educational "reforms" that have generally degraded the educational system's effectiveness, failed at all stated goals, massively increased costs, and occasionally observably made kids more violent.
...And the list goes on and on, but these would be a start. I suppose the short summary would be that, in the 1960s, Progressivism gained a critical mass of support sufficient to implement its policies, and that we live now in the ruins that they made of what once was a remarkably prosperous and orderly society.
How do you square this theory with the fact that many European countries have gone further with their progressive reforms along all of these dimensions (at least, that is my general impression - I'm not willing to claim expertise in every single EU member state's social policies and what it's like to live there, but I am willing to claim that most Americans perceive that European countries are both more progressive and less disordered than the US).
So, do European countries not have no-fault divorce? Do they not have lax drug policies or housing projects? Are the cops in London going around cracking rough sleepers over the head with their billy clubs and shipping them off to institutions? (I mention London specifically because the UK is the only European (kind of?) country I have any experience traveling in, and it's generally amazing to me how few "street people" you see in the cities. Most people I've talked to about this cite the stronger social safety net as being the reason.
As much as I instinctively would like more aggressive policing of vagrancy, vandalism, and property crime in American cities, I'm not sure it will solve the fundamental problem of too many people without jobs or other economic support. Given what it costs to actually arrest, jail, bring to trial, convict, and imprison somebody, it's simply not worth prosecuting most low-level property crime, even if it makes living in cities hell. Low-crime times and places seem more correlated with "enough jobs and housing to go around" than with "enough cops, courts and jails".
European countries are more or less racially homogeneous in comparison. That's how, I'd say.
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