I am excited about the Abundance movement. It's really important, and I want it to succeed. Please take the following comment in that spirit.
> First, you’d have a record of votes that match your conception of the public good, but are against the preferences of the traditional superuser interest groups.
You are making a fatal mistake here: confusing the politics of the status quo and rentiers with politics-as-such. Politics-as-such runs by transactional negotiations among concentrated interests, not by above-the-fray "good policy" types transcending parochial concerns.
> the combination of a few YIMBY elected champions taking politically hard votes (e.g. Nancy Skinner, Scott Wiener)
You're reading history backwards. Scott didn't hurt his career by becoming pro-housing; he accelerated it. The bad guys aren't political and the good guys aren't above politics. It's all politics. YIMBY has made progress by doing transactional politics. Consider Scott's reaction to the defeat of ambitious bills: he works with interest groups and other legislators to determine what will shift their votes, and makes the changes necessary to get a good bill passed where a great one failed.
Abundance can do an enormous amount of good. I plan to support it. But it will succeed only if it is a political movement that grapples with how politics works, not if it is an attempt to be more pure than politics.
With respect this reads like a movement written in corporate speak. I’ve read Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein and this article was more dense than either.
I don’t think you’re going to get many “Abundance” politicians in a democracy with elections taking place every 2 years and campaign finance the way it is
I'd really like to see public meetings replaced in some cases with deliberative polls, precisely because public meetings select for _a specific slice_ of "the public". Instead of having five public meetings, do one deliberative poll, with a representative sample of the community (potentially including trying to recruit stakeholders like people who work in the community but don't currently live there).
Dear Misha and company—
I am excited about the Abundance movement. It's really important, and I want it to succeed. Please take the following comment in that spirit.
> First, you’d have a record of votes that match your conception of the public good, but are against the preferences of the traditional superuser interest groups.
You are making a fatal mistake here: confusing the politics of the status quo and rentiers with politics-as-such. Politics-as-such runs by transactional negotiations among concentrated interests, not by above-the-fray "good policy" types transcending parochial concerns.
> the combination of a few YIMBY elected champions taking politically hard votes (e.g. Nancy Skinner, Scott Wiener)
You're reading history backwards. Scott didn't hurt his career by becoming pro-housing; he accelerated it. The bad guys aren't political and the good guys aren't above politics. It's all politics. YIMBY has made progress by doing transactional politics. Consider Scott's reaction to the defeat of ambitious bills: he works with interest groups and other legislators to determine what will shift their votes, and makes the changes necessary to get a good bill passed where a great one failed.
Abundance can do an enormous amount of good. I plan to support it. But it will succeed only if it is a political movement that grapples with how politics works, not if it is an attempt to be more pure than politics.
With respect this reads like a movement written in corporate speak. I’ve read Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein and this article was more dense than either.
I don’t think you’re going to get many “Abundance” politicians in a democracy with elections taking place every 2 years and campaign finance the way it is
I'd really like to see public meetings replaced in some cases with deliberative polls, precisely because public meetings select for _a specific slice_ of "the public". Instead of having five public meetings, do one deliberative poll, with a representative sample of the community (potentially including trying to recruit stakeholders like people who work in the community but don't currently live there).