Most of the land around you is owned by people who don’t know you, who don’t support what you’re doing, who don’t particularly want you to be there, and who don’t care about your community. If they can evict the affordable vegan food dispensary and replace it with a cheesecake factory that will pay higher rent, they will do that, repeatedly, until your ability to profit from your surroundings as a resident is as close to zero as they can make it without driving you away to another city, and if you did go to another city, you would watch the same thing happen all over again. You are living in the lands of tasteless lords, who will allow you to ignore the land-war that’s always raging, it’s just a third of your income, they tell you, it’s just what it costs.
That’s not what it costs. We can get it a lot cheaper if we coordinate. And whatever we use to coordinate can probably be extended to arranging a much more livable sort of city.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about what it would take to build a city in the desert where members’ proximity desires are measured, clustered and optimised over, where rights to hold land are awarded and revoked on the basis of that. There would be no optimal method, but we don’t need an optimal method. All we need is something that works well enough to beat the clusterfuck of exploitation and alienation that is a modern city. The system would gather us all together and we would be able to focus on our work.
I’ll need more algorithms before I can even make a concrete proposal. Has anyone got some theory on preference aggregation algorithms. I feel like if I can learn a simple, flexible preference graph order recovery algorithm I’ll be able to do a lot with that.
It’ll probably involve quadratic voting on some level. Glen Weyl has a lot of useful ideas.
I don’t think you need to build a city from scratch. It’s sufficient to converge on a (partially?) abandoned city with cheap real estate. This is basically what gentrification is.
Version 0.01 of a new city is to simply get together a group of people who want to work on projects uninterrupted, buy or rent a cheap house in a town the public has forgotten about, and live/work there. 10 or 20 housemates is plenty to feel a sense of community. The EA Hotel is a recent experiment with this. I just spent 6 months there and had a great experience. They’re doing a fundraiser now if you want to contribute.
Experimenting with new gentrification strategies sounds like a cool idea, I’m just skeptical of building new real estate in the middle of nowhere if there’s plenty of real estate in the middle of nowhere which is already available. (Also, I think your post would benefit from a more even-handed presentation.)
I’m certainly interested in playing with reallocation systems in existing cities, but if we can go beyond that, we must.
“Gentrification”, for me includes the effect where land prices increase without any increase in value. That pricing does useful work by allocating land to its most profitable uses. It does that through costly bidding wars and ruthless extraction of rent, which have horrible side-effects of reducing the benefits regular people derive from living in cities by, I’d guess, maybe 80%? (Reminder: not only is your rent too damn high, but so is the rent of the businesses you frequent), allocating vast quantities of money to the landowning class, who often aren’t producing anything (especially often in san fransisco). If we can make a system that allocates land to its most productive use without those side-effects, then we no longer need market-pricing as a civic mechanism, and we should be trying like hell to get away from it. Everyone should be trying like hell to get away from it, but people who believe they have a viable mostly side-effect-free substitute should be trying especially hard.
A large part of the reason I’m attracted to the idea of building in a rural or undeveloped area is it will probably be easier to gain the use of eminent domain, in that situation. If we’re building amid farmland, and we ask the state for the right to buy land directly adjacent to the city at a price of say… double the inflation-adjusted price of local farmland as of the signing of the deal, it’s hard to argue that anyone loses out much in that situation. There wasn’t really much of a chance that land was going to rise to that price on its own, any rise would have been an obvious exploitation of the effects of the city. If you ask for a similar privilege on urban land, forced sale at capped price is a lot more messy (and, of course, the price cap will be like 8x higher), for one, raising land prices in response to adjacent development is just what land-owners are used to in cities and they will throw a very noisy fit if someone threatens that.
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.
I decided to stop thinking about the Copeland method (method where you count how many victories each candidate has had and sort everyone according to that). They don’t mention it in the analysis (pricks!) but the flaw is so obvious I’m not gonna be humble about this
Say you have a set of order judgements like this:
< = { (s p) (s p) (s p) (s p) (s p) (s p) (s p) (s p) (s p) (p u) (p u) (p u) (p u) }
It’s a situation where the candidate “s” is a strawman. No one actually thinks s is good. It isn’t relevant and we probably shouldn’t be discussing it. (But we must discuss it, because no informed process is setting the agenda, and this system will be responsible for fixing the agenda. Being able to operate in a situation where the attention of the collective is misdirected is mandatory)
p is popular. p is better than the strawman, but that isn’t saying much.
u is the ultimate, and is known by some to be better than p in every way. There is no controversy about that, among those who know u.
Under the copeland method, u still loses to p because p has fought more times and won more times.
The Copeland method is just another popularity contest. It is not meritocratic. It cannot overturn an incumbency by helping a few trusted seekers to spread word about their finding. It does not spread findings. It cannot help new things rise to prominence. Disregard the Copeland method.
---
A couple days ago I started thinking about defining a metric by thinking of every edge in the graph (every judgement) as having a “charge” and then defining a way of reducing serial wires and a way of reducing parallel wires, then getting the total charge between each pair of points (it’ll have time complexity n^3 at first but I can think of lots of ways to optimise that. I wouldn’t expect much better from a formal objective measure), then assembling that into a ranking.
Finding serial and parallel reducers with the right properties didn’t seem difficult (I’m currently looking at parallel(a, b)→ a + b and serial(a, b)→ 1/(1/a + 1/b)). That was very exciting to realise. The current problem is, it’s not clear that every tangle can be trivially reduced to an expression of parallels and serials, consider the paths between the top left and bottom right nodes in a network shaped like “▥”, for instance.
Calculating the conductance between two points in a tangled circuit may be a good analogy here… and I have a little intuition that this would be NP hard in the most general case despite being deceptively tractable in real-world cases. Someone here might be able to dismiss or confirm that. I’m sure it’s been studied, but I can’t find a general method, nor a proof of hardness.
If true, it would make this not so obviously useful as a formal measure sufficient for use in elections.
Most of the land around you is owned by people who don’t know you, who don’t support what you’re doing, who don’t particularly want you to be there, and who don’t care about your community. If they can evict the affordable vegan food dispensary and replace it with a cheesecake factory that will pay higher rent, they will do that, repeatedly, until your ability to profit from your surroundings as a resident is as close to zero as they can make it without driving you away to another city, and if you did go to another city, you would watch the same thing happen all over again. You are living in the lands of tasteless lords, who will allow you to ignore the land-war that’s always raging, it’s just a third of your income, they tell you, it’s just what it costs.
That’s not what it costs. We can get it a lot cheaper if we coordinate. And whatever we use to coordinate can probably be extended to arranging a much more livable sort of city.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about what it would take to build a city in the desert where members’ proximity desires are measured, clustered and optimised over, where rights to hold land are awarded and revoked on the basis of that. There would be no optimal method, but we don’t need an optimal method. All we need is something that works well enough to beat the clusterfuck of exploitation and alienation that is a modern city. The system would gather us all together and we would be able to focus on our work.
I’ll need more algorithms before I can even make a concrete proposal. Has anyone got some theory on preference aggregation algorithms. I feel like if I can learn a simple, flexible preference graph order recovery algorithm I’ll be able to do a lot with that.
It’ll probably involve quadratic voting on some level. Glen Weyl has a lot of useful ideas.
I don’t think you need to build a city from scratch. It’s sufficient to converge on a (partially?) abandoned city with cheap real estate. This is basically what gentrification is.
Version 0.01 of a new city is to simply get together a group of people who want to work on projects uninterrupted, buy or rent a cheap house in a town the public has forgotten about, and live/work there. 10 or 20 housemates is plenty to feel a sense of community. The EA Hotel is a recent experiment with this. I just spent 6 months there and had a great experience. They’re doing a fundraiser now if you want to contribute.
Experimenting with new gentrification strategies sounds like a cool idea, I’m just skeptical of building new real estate in the middle of nowhere if there’s plenty of real estate in the middle of nowhere which is already available. (Also, I think your post would benefit from a more even-handed presentation.)
I’m certainly interested in playing with reallocation systems in existing cities, but if we can go beyond that, we must.
“Gentrification”, for me includes the effect where land prices increase without any increase in value. That pricing does useful work by allocating land to its most profitable uses. It does that through costly bidding wars and ruthless extraction of rent, which have horrible side-effects of reducing the benefits regular people derive from living in cities by, I’d guess, maybe 80%? (Reminder: not only is your rent too damn high, but so is the rent of the businesses you frequent), allocating vast quantities of money to the landowning class, who often aren’t producing anything (especially often in san fransisco). If we can make a system that allocates land to its most productive use without those side-effects, then we no longer need market-pricing as a civic mechanism, and we should be trying like hell to get away from it. Everyone should be trying like hell to get away from it, but people who believe they have a viable mostly side-effect-free substitute should be trying especially hard.
A large part of the reason I’m attracted to the idea of building in a rural or undeveloped area is it will probably be easier to gain the use of eminent domain, in that situation. If we’re building amid farmland, and we ask the state for the right to buy land directly adjacent to the city at a price of say… double the inflation-adjusted price of local farmland as of the signing of the deal, it’s hard to argue that anyone loses out much in that situation. There wasn’t really much of a chance that land was going to rise to that price on its own, any rise would have been an obvious exploitation of the effects of the city. If you ask for a similar privilege on urban land, forced sale at capped price is a lot more messy (and, of course, the price cap will be like 8x higher), for one, raising land prices in response to adjacent development is just what land-owners are used to in cities and they will throw a very noisy fit if someone threatens that.
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.
Update on preference graph order recovery
I decided to stop thinking about the Copeland method (method where you count how many victories each candidate has had and sort everyone according to that). They don’t mention it in the analysis (pricks!) but the flaw is so obvious I’m not gonna be humble about this
Say you have a set of order judgements like this:
< = { (s p) (s p) (s p) (s p) (s p) (s p) (s p) (s p) (s p) (p u) (p u) (p u) (p u) }
It’s a situation where the candidate “s” is a strawman. No one actually thinks s is good. It isn’t relevant and we probably shouldn’t be discussing it. (But we must discuss it, because no informed process is setting the agenda, and this system will be responsible for fixing the agenda. Being able to operate in a situation where the attention of the collective is misdirected is mandatory)
p is popular. p is better than the strawman, but that isn’t saying much.
u is the ultimate, and is known by some to be better than p in every way. There is no controversy about that, among those who know u.
Under the copeland method, u still loses to p because p has fought more times and won more times.
The Copeland method is just another popularity contest. It is not meritocratic. It cannot overturn an incumbency by helping a few trusted seekers to spread word about their finding. It does not spread findings. It cannot help new things rise to prominence. Disregard the Copeland method.
---
A couple days ago I started thinking about defining a metric by thinking of every edge in the graph (every judgement) as having a “charge” and then defining a way of reducing serial wires and a way of reducing parallel wires, then getting the total charge between each pair of points (it’ll have time complexity n^3 at first but I can think of lots of ways to optimise that. I wouldn’t expect much better from a formal objective measure), then assembling that into a ranking.
Finding serial and parallel reducers with the right properties didn’t seem difficult (I’m currently looking at parallel(a, b)→ a + b and serial(a, b)→ 1/(1/a + 1/b)). That was very exciting to realise. The current problem is, it’s not clear that every tangle can be trivially reduced to an expression of parallels and serials, consider the paths between the top left and bottom right nodes in a network shaped like “▥”, for instance.
Calculating the conductance between two points in a tangled circuit may be a good analogy here… and I have a little intuition that this would be NP hard in the most general case despite being deceptively tractable in real-world cases. Someone here might be able to dismiss or confirm that. I’m sure it’s been studied, but I can’t find a general method, nor a proof of hardness.
If true, it would make this not so obviously useful as a formal measure sufficient for use in elections.