Building a City from Scratch, Fixing Elections by Eliminating Them, and Does Trust Matter to Society?
We're trying out a new format this week that features a couple stories in the news, as well as a shorter book study. Next week we will release our first podcast.
How to Change the World is a weekly blog about reversing American decline. I will (1) study successful models of governance throughout history, primarily in the West, (2) highlight what’s going wrong leading to institutional decline or ‘political decay’, and (3) present models of democratic innovation that could lead us into a prosperous, peaceful and abundant 21st century.
Greetings. Today we’re going to try out our new format where I’ll a) give a brief intro b) talk about a few things in the news and then c) talk about ONE TAKEAWAY (not ten like usual) from an important book on governance. This will hopefully give us a current and also longer-term perspective.
This week I switch books from James C. Scott’s Seeing like a State, to Francis Fukuyama’s “Trust - The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity”. I made the switch half way through Scott’s book because I felt all I’d been reading on governance all year were negative examples and I need something a little sunny to keep up my morale. So hopefully we’ll learn something about Trust, why it’s valuable and how to generate more of it.
In the news:
The Worst People run for Office. It’s Time for a Better Way. - Adam Grant
In this article Adam Grant, organizational psychologist at U Penn’s Wharton School gives a support of sortition, the election style practiced in ancient Greece when democracy was first being invented. Sortition, if you’re not familiar, is basically random selection. The same way that a jury is just a bunch of your peers, so too would be your representatives under a system of sortition. He advises that they could be required to pass some kind of civics test in order to be eligible, and cites successful examples of sortition being used in present day.
He cites the need for a new way of finding leadership by discussing the decline of trust in our politicians, and how politics attracts those with the “dark triad” personality traits (narcissism, machiavelianism, and psychopathy). These are people drawn to power for its own sake and literally the exact opposite of the type of leader who will be honest and look out for your best interests. If you have a sense that certain politicians may be looking out for their own interests rather that yours, you’re probably right - they’re probably under the dark triad. According to Grant, people with those traits not only make worse decisions while in office, but are also more likely to win elections because they excel at telling you what you want to hear and putting on superficial charm.
Grant’s suggestion of sortition is in the category of systemic election reforms which could yield dramatically different and better results compared with our broken election system. Another such systemic election reform which I’m partial to is outlined in the book The Politics Industry.
In the face of worsening politics, such bold reforms are worth a try and should be experimented with at local, county and state levels to see how they go. Our system is designed well enough that if we just keep “dark triad” types out of office we should be able to thrive. But this would take a lot of pressure from citizens to accomplish. There aren’t many leaders who would champion putting themselves out of a job.
The Silicon Valley Elite Who Want To Build a City From Scratch - NYT
This article talks about a group of billionaire VCs who have been buying up tens of thousands of acres of ranching land outside of silicon valley with the intention of starting a city from scratch. They’re purported to have been working on it since 2017 but it’s all been hush hush, so details are few. The few details we have are that it would be an “urban blank slate where everything from design to construction methods and new forms of governance could be rethought” and “as walkable as Paris or the West Village in New York.”
What interests me about this story is the opportunity to create a modern governance model from scratch. How might we use the internet to get preferences and feedback from citizens? How might we decide on and fund public projects in new ways? How might we run elections? What if we had no parties, just candidates with track records and reputations, verified by local leaders? Or what if it were the first US city to break the two party domination and support many parties?
Beyond governance there are other potential improvements, like housing prices could be dramatically driven down by intelligent zoning laws and cutting edge construction methods and materials.
On the other hand, as I’ve written about recently, planned cities can also have a dystopian and un-human vibe. We already know what cities we like best - the old ones that evolved organically. But I’ll leave the aesthetic commentary to someone else.
Trust - Francis Fukuyama - Chapter 1
“A nation’s well-being, as well as its ability to compete, is conditioned by a single, pervasive cultural characteristic: the level of trust inherent in the society.” - Fukuyama
I’ve been interested in the concept of Trust for a while now. I started a consultancy called Civic Trust in 2019 that helps local governments run a trust-building process with their local population. I chose trust as the point of focus because it’s so essential and yet so difficult to replace, and is currently being depleted across nearly all of our institutions. Trust is built up over years, decades of honorable behavior and once in place removes a vast amount of friction from everyday life. Indeed, on a level we struggle to appreciate, America’s prosperity has a lot to do with trust.
So let’s find out what a formidable intellect like Fukuyama has to say about this weighty subject - a subject which so often goes undiscussed because it is so ubiquitous like air and water. And just as we become concerned when we measure toxins in our environment, so should we be concerned when we detect that our trust in our institutions, our leaders and in each other - literally required elements for flourishing, are on the decline
Responses to the above were on a 9 point scale, so it’s not that 41% of people trust government leaders and 59% do not. It’s that collectively people give the government a 4 our of 10, or an F- on trust.
“Liberal political and economic institutions depend on a healthy and dynamic civil society for their vitality. “Civil society” - a complete welter of intermediate institutions, including business, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches - builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.”
Interestingly , this book came out five years before Robert Putnam’s classic about the unwinding of civic culture, Bowling Alone.
A final note I’ll make is that this book, not even 30 years old, reads like a time capsule. It tells the story of a completely different culture. Fukuyama wrote this book after his vastly more famous The End of History and the Last Man. They are both a note from the halcyon 90’s when one could imagine free market liberalism had more or less literally solved the world’s problems.
Today virtually all advanced countries have adopted, or are trying to adopt, liberal democratic political institutions, and a great number have simultaneously moved in the direction of market-oriented economies and integration into global capitalist division of labor.
Counter this with the rise of China and the subsequent decline of democracy around the world.
But a corollary to the convergence of institutions at the “end of history” is the widespread acknowledgement that in postindustrial societies, further improvements cannot be achieved through ambitious social engineering. We no longer have realistic hopes that we can create a “great society” through large government programs. — the Clinton administration’s difficulties in promoting health care reform in 1994 indicated that Americans remained skeptical about the workability of large-scale government management of an important sector of their economy.
Again, he fails to anticipate Obamacare which would help push healthcare costs to 3x per person what they were at the time of his writing. And many people take seriously UBI, a system which puts the entire country on the government dole.
I was not able to find more recent graphs (they’re not flattering, after all!), but the present annual cost of healthcare is $12,500 per person.
Even Keyensian deficit spending, once widely used by industrial democracies after the Great Depression to manage the business cycle, is today regarded by most economists as self-defeating in the long run.
I don’t how what happened to those economists from the 90’s that didn’t like deficit spending, but they’re long gone. If I had more time I would overlay a bright vertical line through this graph at the year 1995 so that you could see how totally, 180 degrees wrong Fukuyama was in his assessment of how future governments would handle the economy.
Does that mean this book is an anachronism? No, I don’t think it will be. I believe Fukuyama’s assessment of the value of trust will be spot on, and if anything the 180 degree turn of many of our policies since his writing might offer clues to why trust has not only cratered, but continues to plummet.
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Matt Harder runs the civic engagement firm Civic Trust, where he helps cities strengthen their civic environment by helping residents, civic organizations, and local government work together to create public projects. Follow him on Twitter.