Problems People Won't Solve
I was grimly gratified to see this article discussing something I've often pointed out: that there are numerous problems which don't get solved because people damn well don't want to.
I have a lot of conversations with people about the challenge of doing fill-in-the-blank: improving public schools, building affordable housing, replacing corporate chains with local mom and pop shops, getting public infrastructure expenditures in line with the local tax base… And here’s my general response. We, as a society, don’t want to solve these problems. Not really. So we won’t.
Some people would like to solve these problems. The problem is, there aren't enough of them, they aren't in positions of power, or both. The people who want those problems to stay unsolved are able to block solutions, so they do.
Put climate change on that list. >_< The people dragging their feet about it are literally destroying the biosphere, and everyone's paying the price. Literally. Disasters caused $210 billion in damage in 2020. Like pretty much everything else in climate change, it only gets worse: climate change could cut the world economy by $23 trillion in 2050. If you come against someone arguing that remediation efforts are too expensive, hit them with numbers like that and demand that they justify the losses.
Not all that long ago the huge disparity of racially segregated schools became a national embarrassment and a moral dilemma. Federal troops were brought in to enforce integration as part of the constitutional civil rights movement. But what really happened in practice?
Black children were shuffled in to white schools by armed soldiers. In response, white families immediately pulled their kids from the public system and enrolled them in a parallel private system of Christian academies. Then the public schools were radically defunded by white dominated local councils that no longer valued the public system and didn’t want to spend white tax dollars supporting the de facto black system.
I have pointed out, repeatedly, that desegregation didn't work very well because too many people don't want to live and work in mixed environments. You can only do so much to force them together. Even at many mixed schools, the kids exist in the same environment but won't willingly interact, having separate friend circles, lunch tables, etc. Oil and water; without an emulsifier, they spring apart. Now, it's possible to create truly integrated environments -- one of my schools was so mixed there wasn't a majority of anything -- but it's not easy. It helped that we were nerds who mostly thought racism was ridiculous. If you are one of the people who wants racial integration to work, you need a lot more sophisticated tools than brute force.
One of the side effects of this pattern is that towns learned to zone and code development in a way that made it highly unlikely that poor people of any color would ever be able to move in. Minimum lot size, minimum home size, auto-dependent zoning, and so on kept out the riffraff. If you couldn’t afford a fully detached single family home and at least one halfway reliable car you were excluded – not by unconstitutional illegal racial covenants, but by economics and geography.
This has created a lot of other problems, and it contributes to things like sprawl and the growth Ponzi scheme. Bigger lots, bigger houses, longer roads = more infrastructure that doesn't support itself so isn't sustainable.
When mandates for public transit were tied to highway funding towns reluctantly ran mostly empty buses once an hour between the mall, the community college, and the senior center. It was transit. But it was also useless.
When people don't want to do something, but are forced to, one tactic they frequently take is doing it so badly that it causes formerly unaligned people to hate it and join them in fighting it. Remember that an earlier version of public housing led to ghastly urban projects, because nobody in charge wanted to do a good job. Originally hailed as a solution to slums, the projects quickly became a despised symbol of urban blight -- leading more people to oppose any kind of affordable housing later on.
This is the system that we’ve inherited. But here’s the rub. A larger and larger proportion of the American population of all colors is slipping from comfortable middle class status to a state of reduced circumstances. Many of the folks who always believed they could buy their way in to the better places are now finding themselves in the lesser environments – the kinds of situations they were happy to impose on others in the past. And they’re really pissed off about it.
Being rich is about wealth management; being middle class is about experiences; being poor is about survival. Most of America is now poor. They don't want to admit it, but they're one car failure, medical emergency, or lost job from the street. This is not good for anyone. A society that can't meet its citizens' needs is a failure.
Now, it is possible to solve some unpopular problems on a local level if you have enough determined people who care about these things. But it's often easier to start from scratch than to work within a system that fights you.
I have a lot of conversations with people about the challenge of doing fill-in-the-blank: improving public schools, building affordable housing, replacing corporate chains with local mom and pop shops, getting public infrastructure expenditures in line with the local tax base… And here’s my general response. We, as a society, don’t want to solve these problems. Not really. So we won’t.
Some people would like to solve these problems. The problem is, there aren't enough of them, they aren't in positions of power, or both. The people who want those problems to stay unsolved are able to block solutions, so they do.
Put climate change on that list. >_< The people dragging their feet about it are literally destroying the biosphere, and everyone's paying the price. Literally. Disasters caused $210 billion in damage in 2020. Like pretty much everything else in climate change, it only gets worse: climate change could cut the world economy by $23 trillion in 2050. If you come against someone arguing that remediation efforts are too expensive, hit them with numbers like that and demand that they justify the losses.
Not all that long ago the huge disparity of racially segregated schools became a national embarrassment and a moral dilemma. Federal troops were brought in to enforce integration as part of the constitutional civil rights movement. But what really happened in practice?
Black children were shuffled in to white schools by armed soldiers. In response, white families immediately pulled their kids from the public system and enrolled them in a parallel private system of Christian academies. Then the public schools were radically defunded by white dominated local councils that no longer valued the public system and didn’t want to spend white tax dollars supporting the de facto black system.
I have pointed out, repeatedly, that desegregation didn't work very well because too many people don't want to live and work in mixed environments. You can only do so much to force them together. Even at many mixed schools, the kids exist in the same environment but won't willingly interact, having separate friend circles, lunch tables, etc. Oil and water; without an emulsifier, they spring apart. Now, it's possible to create truly integrated environments -- one of my schools was so mixed there wasn't a majority of anything -- but it's not easy. It helped that we were nerds who mostly thought racism was ridiculous. If you are one of the people who wants racial integration to work, you need a lot more sophisticated tools than brute force.
One of the side effects of this pattern is that towns learned to zone and code development in a way that made it highly unlikely that poor people of any color would ever be able to move in. Minimum lot size, minimum home size, auto-dependent zoning, and so on kept out the riffraff. If you couldn’t afford a fully detached single family home and at least one halfway reliable car you were excluded – not by unconstitutional illegal racial covenants, but by economics and geography.
This has created a lot of other problems, and it contributes to things like sprawl and the growth Ponzi scheme. Bigger lots, bigger houses, longer roads = more infrastructure that doesn't support itself so isn't sustainable.
When mandates for public transit were tied to highway funding towns reluctantly ran mostly empty buses once an hour between the mall, the community college, and the senior center. It was transit. But it was also useless.
When people don't want to do something, but are forced to, one tactic they frequently take is doing it so badly that it causes formerly unaligned people to hate it and join them in fighting it. Remember that an earlier version of public housing led to ghastly urban projects, because nobody in charge wanted to do a good job. Originally hailed as a solution to slums, the projects quickly became a despised symbol of urban blight -- leading more people to oppose any kind of affordable housing later on.
This is the system that we’ve inherited. But here’s the rub. A larger and larger proportion of the American population of all colors is slipping from comfortable middle class status to a state of reduced circumstances. Many of the folks who always believed they could buy their way in to the better places are now finding themselves in the lesser environments – the kinds of situations they were happy to impose on others in the past. And they’re really pissed off about it.
Being rich is about wealth management; being middle class is about experiences; being poor is about survival. Most of America is now poor. They don't want to admit it, but they're one car failure, medical emergency, or lost job from the street. This is not good for anyone. A society that can't meet its citizens' needs is a failure.
Now, it is possible to solve some unpopular problems on a local level if you have enough determined people who care about these things. But it's often easier to start from scratch than to work within a system that fights you.