22 Comments

I’ve alway thought most regulation is counter productive. Better to let the courts interpret property rights and let people self-regulate as much as possible.

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Yeah, no.

Being sued AFTER YOU'VE BUILT THE SKYSCRAPER is a massive problem. Better to have a process that allows you to solicit all the complaints up front and get rulings on them.

And yes, if there's no cost to complaining, people will. By all means impose a cost. But nobody wants to have to play massive games of lawsuit roulette with investments that have already been made - and without a regulatory system to address it, they often don't. Of course, you don't see what didn't happen, so the cost may be less apparent, but it's no less real for that.

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May 16, 2023·edited May 16, 2023

But this is why there are few small scale developers any more. The regulatory cost is too high to buy a lot and build something.

Only big developments get approved. Yes, its good for the skyscraper or the mega- neighborhood developer, but I prefer a system that enables the small guy.

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How would a small scale developer raise capital for a project that might have to be torn out afterward, after it's already been built?

There is one answer, which is "bankruptcy": you build the project, pay out the investors, and if the project then gets sued it just files for bankruptcy.

In other words, you could build any damned thing and, when the neighbors - possibly with considerable justification - complain about it afterwards, you plan to vanish like Kaiser Sose. That doesn't sound socially optimal - nor good for whoever bought the project (which brings us back to "how do you raise capital?").

A better solution, clearly, would be more reasonable zoning requirements.

On reflection, I suspect that the problem with zoning is not that it couldn't reduce total costs for developers, but that it's much easier for anti-development interests to capture. That's the trouble with politics: large numbers of people with very little skin in the game can overrule a few people who care a lot - even if the few people care more, in total, than the large number. (Of course, the other trouble with politics is that a few people with influence in the right circles can overrule many people - even if the many people care more, in total, than the few. It's complicated.)

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Common Law should give you a reasonable idea or what you can or cant build. Capital would be easy to raise in a situation where common law is clear (and is okay with it) and harder in a murky situation.

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Great article as usual, Dr. Caplan. The problem with making it difficult to sue is the simple fact that government almost always overshoots. What happens when it is not difficult to sue, thus removing complainers, but it becomes impossible to sue? Today, the federal government is protected by Sovereign Immunity, meaning they cannot be sued. Routine complaints of noise pollution are one thing. When my brother-in-law was negligently killed by the Defense Department and my sister could not sue, this was not what I consider to be a minor complaint. When government builds a moat around themselves to fully eliminate their own culpability, it can act in any way it wants without disincentive.

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Governments have always been protected by Sovereign Immunity, since the time of kings. The people have a duty to the government; the government has no duty to the people. It's one of the ways you know that the introduction of democracy didn't change things as much as you might have thought.

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Agree. Then there isn't much difference between a republic and a totalitarian state, is there? This must change and the people should seek to modify this.

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Which is exactly why the plaintiffs attorneys are a rent-seeking force to be reckoned with in every state legislature.

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Say what you want about fundamentalism, but the Torah's rule that the plaintiff should get whatever consequence he wished upon the defendant, should his case prove full of fabricated details, was a powerful disincentive of baseless tort.

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as an aside, the late great Ronald Coase wrote about several landmark nusiance cases in his social cost paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4210659

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The real problem was that lawyers and the people who can hire them had outsized power and then captured the regulatory agencies too.

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Haha you admit that people are complainers, meaning most people are not content with their lot, and yet you defend a natalist view.

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

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There's no contradiction. People are not reliable reporters, including on such topics as, am I happy and is my life worth living.

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Hahaha wait so you think you can override people’s introspection about how happy they are with their own life? What arrogance!

And if they are so happy, why are they “complainers” as Caplan calls them?

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Local man makes shocking discovery: people are frequently biased and otherwise driven to behave 'dishonestly'.

From a child's first realizing that "i hungee" sometimes produces ice cream to a dying man's feigning sleepiness in the hopes that the nurses will chase off grandchildren's annoying spouses, we live long lives of not-at-all-accurately-modeling our internal experience for others' consumption.

"people are capable of understanding themselves and are always honest about their internal states, never lying in either a negative or a positive direction to manipulate others" is the extraordinary claim that requires evidence. I refer you to anything Robin Hanson ever wrote.

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If anything, people manipulate their appearance in the opposite direction. I think people show themselves to be happier, more content and successful than they actually are or they themselves judge to be. Just look at social media.

People don't want to seem unhappy or miserable to others.

I had never thought that someone would claim people are much happier than they claim because on the face of it and in fact, it is a ridiculous claim.

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Opposite direction from the positive and negative that I specified? Everyone always does both, often in the same minute. Right now, a person is posting a photo on social media that presents a rosier picture than reality while also signalling unhappiness to a spouse in order to extort favors. If in the next few minutes this person might respond to a poller by reporting average life satisfaction. None of these contradict each other, none are honest.

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Can you imagine how much more they would complain if they had never been born?

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You can actually extend this principle further. For example, there is a woman named Timnit Gebru who used to be in charge of AI safety research at Google. She staged a confrontation with them such that she became unemployable, then leveraged her firing into a second career as a whistleblower-martyr. However, if you actually pay close attention to her complaints, they are just the world's most obvious lies in every way. You can't reconstruct what actually happened exactly, but you CAN tell that Gebru's role in it was manipulative and involved considerable use of consciously false deceptive allegations of, for example, interpersonal racism.

The proof is just that she went so far overboard in what she claimed, while never providing any specifics of any kind, and then never sued over it. Like she would have confrontations on Twitter with former colleagues who would say "I disagree with this resignation tweet, it doesn't accord with my understanding of the situation" and then she would get in their face in front of everybody and menace them, trying to make it sound like the two former colleagues had mutual knowledge of mysterious, deeply evil and discriminatory incidents at Google. But there were never any lawsuits, or hints of a lawsuit. If anything, it was obvious that Google was refraining from suing HER, even though they almost certainly could have won a major judgment.

None of it made any sense and she was (and is) so obviously just a pathological liar, who apparently gets to be a major public figure even though everybody kind of knows this because taking her down would be too hard and confusing for reporters. It's a grim situation, like if Tara Reade had somehow become untouchable in public and tyro reporters increasingly didn't understand you were just privately supposed to know.

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And another way to rein in our litigious culture even more would be a provision whereby punitive damages were directed not to the litigant personally but to a charity of their choice. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/

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Or, keep punitive damages out of civil court. Punitive damages are a punishment, that should only be done via criminal court. Period.

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