No comment on the voting strategy, just wanted to focus on the idea that “the value of the land is mostly the proximity of other people, so why not coordinate and move to a new cheap place together?”
First, I wonder whether it is actually true. As far as I know, most cities are at a place that has some intrinsic value, such as a crossing of trade roads, a port, or a mine. I wonder how much this is necessary, and how much it is just history’s way to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of coordination by saying “first movers come here because of the intrinsic advantage, everyone else moves here because someone already moved here before them”.
On one hand, for many people “the value is the proximity of neighbors” is true. If you have a shop, you want to have many customers near you. If you are an employee, you want many employers near you, and vice versa. People move to e.g. the Silicon Valley because of everything that already is in the Silicon Valley; if you could somehow teleport the whole Silicon Valley into a not-very-awful place, this dynamics would probably remain. On the other hand, you have cities like Detroit, where removing an important piece (jobs in car industry) made everything fall apart; the “proximity to many neighbors” was not enough to save it. So having many people at the same place is not necessarily a recipe for success; the whole “ecosystem” needs to be in some kind of balance, which would be difficult to achieve with a new city.
Second, yeah, coordinating people is hard. Look at the Free State Project, where people coordinated to move to the same US state. It took them a few years to coordinate 20 000 people, just to move to existing cities, with existing infrastructure and job opportunities, within USA. How long would it take to coordinate people to move somewhere to a desert, and how many people would actually go there?
There are many kinds of commerce I don’t know much about. I’m going to need help with figuring out what a weird city where the cost of living is extremely low is going to need to become productive. The industries I do know about are fairly unlikely to require proximity to a port, but even in that set.. a lot of them will want proximity to manufacturing and manufacturing in turn will want to be near a port?
Can you think of any reasons we couldn’t make the coordinated city’s counterpart to the FSP’s Statement of Intent contract legally binding, imposing large fines on anyone who fails to keep to their commitment? (while attempting to provide exceptions for people who can prove they were not in control of whatever kept them from keeping their commitment, where possible) Without that, I’d doubt those commitments will amount to much.
For a lot of people a scheme like this will be the only hope they’ll ever have of owning (a share in) any urban property, if they can be convinced of the beneficence of the reallocation algorithms (I imagine there will be many opportunities to test them before building a fully coordinated city), I don’t really understand what it is about the FSP that libertarians find so exciting, but I feel like coordinated city makes more concrete promises of immediate and long-term QoL than the FSP ever did. Note, the allocator includes the promise of finding ourselves surrounded by like-minded individuals
Can you think of any reasons we couldn’t make the coordinated city’s counterpart to the FSP’s Statement of Intent contract legally binding, imposing large fines on anyone who fails to keep to their commitment?
Because then even fewer people would sign it. And the remaining ones will be looking for loopholes.
For a lot of people a scheme like this will be the only hope they’ll ever have of owning (a share in) any urban property
Unfortunately, those would be most scared of the “large fines”.
They have very little to be afraid of if their commitment is true, and if it’s not, we don’t want it. The commitment thing isn’t just a marketing stunt. It’s a viability survey. The data has to be good.
I guess I should add, on top of the process for forgiving commitments under unavoidable mitigating circumstances, there should be a process for deciding whether the city met its part of the bargain. If the facilities are not what was promised, fines must be reduced or erased.
No comment on the voting strategy, just wanted to focus on the idea that “the value of the land is mostly the proximity of other people, so why not coordinate and move to a new cheap place together?”
First, I wonder whether it is actually true. As far as I know, most cities are at a place that has some intrinsic value, such as a crossing of trade roads, a port, or a mine. I wonder how much this is necessary, and how much it is just history’s way to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of coordination by saying “first movers come here because of the intrinsic advantage, everyone else moves here because someone already moved here before them”.
On one hand, for many people “the value is the proximity of neighbors” is true. If you have a shop, you want to have many customers near you. If you are an employee, you want many employers near you, and vice versa. People move to e.g. the Silicon Valley because of everything that already is in the Silicon Valley; if you could somehow teleport the whole Silicon Valley into a not-very-awful place, this dynamics would probably remain. On the other hand, you have cities like Detroit, where removing an important piece (jobs in car industry) made everything fall apart; the “proximity to many neighbors” was not enough to save it. So having many people at the same place is not necessarily a recipe for success; the whole “ecosystem” needs to be in some kind of balance, which would be difficult to achieve with a new city.
Second, yeah, coordinating people is hard. Look at the Free State Project, where people coordinated to move to the same US state. It took them a few years to coordinate 20 000 people, just to move to existing cities, with existing infrastructure and job opportunities, within USA. How long would it take to coordinate people to move somewhere to a desert, and how many people would actually go there?
There are many kinds of commerce I don’t know much about. I’m going to need help with figuring out what a weird city where the cost of living is extremely low is going to need to become productive. The industries I do know about are fairly unlikely to require proximity to a port, but even in that set.. a lot of them will want proximity to manufacturing and manufacturing in turn will want to be near a port?
Can you think of any reasons we couldn’t make the coordinated city’s counterpart to the FSP’s Statement of Intent contract legally binding, imposing large fines on anyone who fails to keep to their commitment? (while attempting to provide exceptions for people who can prove they were not in control of whatever kept them from keeping their commitment, where possible) Without that, I’d doubt those commitments will amount to much.
For a lot of people a scheme like this will be the only hope they’ll ever have of owning (a share in) any urban property, if they can be convinced of the beneficence of the reallocation algorithms (I imagine there will be many opportunities to test them before building a fully coordinated city), I don’t really understand what it is about the FSP that libertarians find so exciting, but I feel like coordinated city makes more concrete promises of immediate and long-term QoL than the FSP ever did. Note, the allocator includes the promise of finding ourselves surrounded by like-minded individuals
Because then even fewer people would sign it. And the remaining ones will be looking for loopholes.
Unfortunately, those would be most scared of the “large fines”.
They have very little to be afraid of if their commitment is true, and if it’s not, we don’t want it. The commitment thing isn’t just a marketing stunt. It’s a viability survey. The data has to be good.
I guess I should add, on top of the process for forgiving commitments under unavoidable mitigating circumstances, there should be a process for deciding whether the city met its part of the bargain. If the facilities are not what was promised, fines must be reduced or erased.