Author Archives: Jake Seliger

Briefly noted: “Honor Thy Father,” “After the Ivory Tower Falls,” and “2034”

September 5, 2022 By in Books, Briefly Noted Tags: , , Leave a comment

* Honor Thy Father by Gay Talese: The takeaway may still be “the mafia is bad and so is crime.” Rising in the mafia is hard for many reasons, one being that a criminal needs only to screw up once to be convicted, while the police and prosecutors can screw up many times and still in some sense come out ahead. Honor Thy Father was published in 1971, and it covers an even earlier era; by 1971, a sense of elegy and things passing or being better in the old days already pervades the mafia story. The Sopranos comes out in 1999 and hits the same themes. Maybe all mafia stories have to concern a mythic past: few are set in whenever the mafia’s heyday—perhaps the 19th Century—may have been. The mafia reality is too tawdry for anything but the good days to have been in the past.

There’s much talk about inheritance—”among the inheritors [of the old-world, Italian mafia and mafia practices] were such men as Frank Labruzzo and Bill Bonanno, who now, in the mid-1960s, in an age of space and rockets, were fighting in a feudal war.” “A feudal war,” but with pistols and other firearms: the future may have been there, but it wasn’t evenly distributed. One day, will people be fighting feudal wars in space? Little about engineering or engineers appears in Honor Thy Father: the most important work of the 1930 to 1970 period was happening in California, at Intel and similar companies, though this wasn’t universally recognized at the time—which may make us: where is the most-important, least-recognized work happening today?

Other descriptions in Honor Thy Father remind us of cultural and other chanage; Bonanno “conveyed to his children his disapproval of tattletales. If they saw their brothers, sisters, or cousins doing something wrong, he had said, it was improper for them to go talebearing to adults, adding that nobody had respect for a stool pigeon, not even those who gained by such information.” Many modern institutions are obsessed with “talebearing” and encourage stool-pigeoning (if you’ll forgive the verbing of nouns). Many of the crimes aren’t crimes: the numbers racket is now the lotto (“If the lawmakers would legitimize numbers betting it would hurt business because it would deprive customers of that satisfactory sense of having beaten the system”), and loan sharking has been subsumed by the payday loan industry. Prostitution is still formally illegal but has moved online, where it’s sufficiently out of sight and to be out of mind.

Monotony, boredom, loneliness: these words recur. Whatever glamor one might infer in the mob life, it’s absent in Bonanno’s life, apart I guess from the glamor of high stakes: most of us aren’t shot if we do our jobs poorly, which is good for quality of life but bad for dramatic tension. Most of us can recover from most mistakes, and a “cutthroat industry” is a metaphor.

* After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It by Will Bunch: If there’s a message to After the Ivory Tower Falls, it’s “conditions change.” What makes sense in one set of conditions, won’t in another: college made sense for most people between 1945 and the 1990s. By the 2000s, growing costs started to change the appeal to the marginal student; Bunch’s tone may also stem from him being a journalist, a field that’s shed about half of its jobs since 2000, and declining fields feel very different from growing ones. I know, because I’ve foolishly pursued work in some declining fields, while other friends work for tech companies.

Much of the “everyone must go to college” mantra comes from slight of hand: college graduates earn more than non-graduates; that means college caused the earnings jump. Stated so bluntly, anyone familiar with how correlation is not causation sees the problem: trying to get everyone to go to college winds up weakening the value of the college-degree signal, and, at the same time, most schools are strongly incentivized by the student-loan program to get as many students in their doors as possible. Prices rise, but schools that sell low-value degrees have no feedback mechanism discouraging them from that behavior—a key point in Paying for the Party (which isn’t cited).

Baumol’s Cost Disease isn’t cited by Bunch either, or Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, which identifies Baumol’s Cost Disease as a main cause of rising costs. So what do we get? A lot of mood affiliation. In Bunch’s telling, nonprofit colleges bear surprisingly little responsibility for their own predatory behavior. Consider this example: “When faith in the American way of college began to wane after years of runaway tuition, Wall Street smelled blood in the water.” Okay, we have a metaphor around “faith” in the first part of the sentence, but then we have a metaphor around a shark attack in the second? Why would waning “faith” lead to the smell of “blood in the water?” The confusing imagery is part of After the Ivory Tower Falls‘ general confusion; it tends to conflate things that should be separate and separate things that should be conflated. The book speaks to the race for entering exclusionary schools, and yet there’s almost nothing about the most expensive cost for the vast majority of households—housing itself. Without looking at the rising cost of housing over the last 50 years, the rising sense of precarity and competitiveness doesn’t make sense. The cost of living feels higher than it used to be because it is higher than it used to be; Bunch’s grandmother could move to California at a time when exclusionary zoning hadn’t made California unaffordable to most people. We used to have abundance; now we have legally-mandated scarcity, and perhaps that should change. The champions of “diversity” in highly exclusionary schools and enclaves are so unintentionally comedic because of how vigorously they speak about diversity while supporting policies that cause and ensure the exact opposite, while never noticing the contradiction. One form of comedy is saying one thing while doing another.

We see data like “Nearly 40 percent of full-time undergraduates who enrolled in the 2011-12 academic year accumulated some debt but did not have a degree after six years, said Mark Huelsman, the director of policy and advocacy at the Hope Center for College, Community and Justice at Temple University.” While schools like Purdue hold down costs and increase value, many others don’t. College is a huge financial and life danger, in a way that it wasn’t in the middle of the 20th Century, but Bunch doesn’t want to foreground the way colleges have contributed.

Some students do really well: those who major in technical subjects like computer science or engineering, especially at state schools with relatively low tuition. Many others don’t; even in expensive, exclusionary schools, it’s not obvious that the payoff is worthwhile, compared to less-expensive schools, particularly for non-geniuses; if you’re doing math 55 at Harvard, great. If you’re doing sociology, is it great? Those graduates will probably be fine, albeit at high tuition costs.

More could be said, but why bother? There is a better book in After the Ivory Tower Falls, but mood affiliation and too little data stops it from appearing.

* 2034: A Novel of the Next World War: Not terribly well written; on the first page, for example, we follow captain Sarah Hunt, commodore of Destroyer Squadron 21: “On a recent sleepless night, she had studied her logbooks and totaled up all the days she had spent traversing the deep ocean, out of sight of land. It added up to nearly nine years. Her memory darted back and forth across those long years, to her watch-standing days as an ensign…” “[O]ut of sight of land” should be removed—”the deep ocean” implies it—and “those long years” should be removed too, since they’re also implied. Expect more of the same, though the plot is interesting: events in the South China Sea and Strait of Hormuz lead to war between the U.S. and China. Spoilers ahead, but the plot deals with the Chinese magically being able to blind U.S. electronic warfare systems—no plausible mechanism for this capability is proposed, unless I missed it, which is possible—and then the U.S. has to resort to older aircraft and systems that aren’t so electronic. This romantic anachronism is like dreaming of a cavalry charge succeeding in World War I. India is the eventual kingmaker; the word “victor” can’t really apply to anyone in a large war, though if there is one, it’s India. As with Tom Clancy novels, the book celebrates diversity in that anyone on the U.S. side can contribute to fighting the CCP.

2034 would make a promising movie—all those visuals of flight decks and missiles—but China now controls Hollywood, so the book will remain the book, unless Peter Thiel wants to fund it. He’s probably not a Story’s Story reader, although you never know.

Links: Rome and an Industrial Revolution, economies of scale in construction, and more!

August 31, 2022 By in Books, Links Tags: Leave a comment

* Maybe Rome was pretty far from an Industrial Revolution. Sadly. I’d thought “lack of printing press” a big precondition, too.

* Is America falling behind China in science?

* Podcast interview with a pseudonymous recent Harvard grad; there is a transcript, too. The material in the first 15 minutes is boring.

* “Why are there so few economies of scale in construction?”

* “Workplace diversity programmes often fail, or backfire: Many may do more to protect against litigation than to reduce discrimination.” It may be that what we choose to foreground has important consequences.

* “Is “Woke” just PC with faster internet?” A usefully historical take.

* “Nature: Manuscripts that are ideologically impure and ‘harmful’ will be rejected.” In case you’re wondering whether the sciences are immune to ideological fads.

* A guide to writing online.

* “On Joseph Tainter: The Collapse of Complex Societies.”

* Arguments in favor of intellectual freedom and the University of Austin.

Links: Effective altruism things, skill development, new Puritans, and more!

August 24, 2022 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* “The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism: William MacAskill’s movement set out to help the global poor.” Are most of us practicing ineffective altruism, if we’re practicing altruism at all?  I’d say that high U.S. housing and transit costs reduce the amounts of money normal or normal-ish people might be able to donate, or to send internationally. We’re beggaring ourselves through housing scarcity and that’s bad, along a variety of axes.

* “Guru Overload: Moving on from the figureheads of the latest culture war drama.” On the failures of what was sometimes called “The Intellectual Dark Web.”

* “Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?” One hopes.

* “Skills Plateau Because Of Decay And Interference?” Does this argue for breadth in skill development and acquisition, over pure “depth?” I’ve wondered about this topic and now see I’m not the only one who has.

* “How Social Justice Became a New Religion: Our society is becoming less religious. Or is it?” I’m not sure the “How” question is answered, let alone the “why” question, but it is of interest.

* Related to the above: “The progressive puritans will fail: They are preaching to a choir in an empty church.” An argument in favor of fun, which has fallen out of official favor.

* “The Suicide of the American Historical Association?”

* Reasons Ted Gioia is publishing his next book on Substack.

* Cracker Barrel leaders realize the utility of ignoring Twitter mobs.

* “Suketu Mehta: ‘As goes India, so goes democracy’.” And a take on democracy falling in India.

* “‘Rings Of Power’ Showrunners Clarify That Any Resemblance To The Works Of Tolkien Is Purely Coincidental.”

Links: Writers, academia, thinking about thinking, and more!

August 17, 2022 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* Similarities between programming and writing.

* “Why William Deresiewicz Left Academia (Since You’re Wondering).” He was pushed out, as he says; the whole essay is highly quotable, but I’ll note that Deresiewicz “went [to grad school], in other words, because I wanted to read books: because I loved books; because I lived my deepest life in books; because art, particularly literary art, meant everything to me.” But he found there that “Loving books is not why people are supposed to become English professors, and it hasn’t been for a long time. Loving books is scoffed at (or would be, if anybody ever copped to it).” This may seem curious, but the way the humanities professoriate has evolved is curious. Deresiewicz says that “what disgusted me the most was not the intellectual corruption. It was the careerism.” The overall essay is consistent with my own writing in “What you should know BEFORE you start grad school / PhD programs in English Literature: The economic, financial, and opportunity costs.”

* The midwit trap, which doesn’t do the essay justice; it concerns the way simple solutions often outperform complex ones, and the challenges of understanding both problem and solution spaces, among other things.

* “Nonprofit boards of directors usually exist to be controlled by the organization’s executive director“—something most people don’t realize but more people should.

* “Inside the Massive Effort to Change the Way Kids Are Taught to Read,” using phonics and direct instruction, which are old, effective, and yet disdained by many people in the education-industrial complex. That we’ve not seen stronger efforts to reform the education of educators seems odd to me.

* Tight versus loose cultures.

* “Why Are American Teenagers So Sad and Anxious?”

* Argument for re-building higher education.

* “You can’t afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected.” Not exactly my view, but of interest.

* On Philip K. Dick. I think Dick understood best that many if not most people don’t want to be free.

Links: The writer-obsessive, escape from the ivory tower, and more!

August 14, 2022 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* On the many facets of Danielle Steel.

* A cyclical theory of subcultures.

* Argument that China “can’t” afford to invade Taiwan, which is interesting, apart from the fact that many countries that couldn’t “afford” to invade their neighbors nonetheless did so anyway. Russia can’t afford to invade Ukraine and yet has done so.

* “Why the Chair of the Lancet’s COVID-19 Commission Thinks The US Government Is Preventing a Real Investigation Into the Pandemic.”

* “Escape from the Ivory Tower,” which concerns the inhumanity of many humanities professors and departments. Perhaps one could links it to an article on why it is not effectively possible to write academic satires any more. You may have thought the Sokal Text affair was unfortunate, but compare it to this!

* “MeToo killed Game of Thrones; Nobody wants a sexless prequel.” Maybe: I guess we’ll see, but I think the dreary, incoherent final two seasons were the bigger problem.

* Book about the homogeneity of writing and sensibility from MFA programs.

* Good and humane essay on Philip Larkin, though with a bad title, and I admire this line: “The greatest writers will always be those who have suffered dully all the wrongs of man, and yet remain alive to a greater wisdom and beauty beyond what they could afford themselves.”

* “Hispanic Voters Are Normie Voters.” Sanity is good.

* Colleges engage in extensive price discrimination.

* “Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory.”

Links: The need for sunlight, modular homes, batteries, and more!

August 11, 2022 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* “Vantem Global Builds Modular Homes Out of Energy-Efficient Panels.” They look good, and housing construction has been stubbornly resistant to efficiency improvements.

* “The U.S. made a breakthrough battery discovery — then gave the technology to China.” Maybe we shouldn’t do that.

* “Skin exposure to UVB light induces a skin-brain-gonad axis and sexual behavior.” It’s in Cell and thus SFW.

* “Sensitivity Readers Are the New Literary Gatekeepers.” Which can’t be helping fiction sales: we used to make fun of the Soviets for insisting on doctrinaire art. Now, big publishers insist on it, which is particularly odd given the vitality of gatekeeper-free Internet writing.

* Has Technological Progress Stalled?

* A Canceled Cancellation at the University of Michigan: “The University of Michigan Medical School just took a bold stand for academic freedom.” I’ve noted many negative examples but think it useful to also cite some positive ones.

* A plan to tax the very large endowments of some universities.

* The national housing shortage is likely in the four to twenty million range.

* “Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals.” The first paragraphs are consistent with previous actions and yet still horrifying.

* “‘The Literary Mafia’ Review: People of the Book.” Jews, books, and ideas.

* An essay against Puritanism, though that’s not the title the author uses. It’s a rant.

Links: The possibility of progress, Google’s regressions, abundance, and more!

August 5, 2022 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* The NYT finally figures it out: “Why It’s So Hard to Find an Affordable Apartment in New York: There simply aren’t enough places to live, a crisis decades in the making and one that poses a threat to the city’s continuing recovery.” They could’ve learned about supply and demand a few decades ago, but “late” is better than “never.” Perhaps anti-market bias led to the paper’s long-running habit of blaming anything and everything else.

* Lowercase Capital wants carbon removal and storage startups. Their call is also a decent overview of some descriptions of where things stand now. I’m a Climeworks subscriber.

* Rob K. Henderson on his experience teaching at the University of Austin, a school focused on open inquiry. That “open inquiry” is an unusual specialization today seems notable.

* “A Russian Sociologist Explains Why Putin’s War Is Going Even Worse Than It Looks.” Maybe.

* Someone on Twitter wrote something like: “Boomers spent decades prohibiting the construction of anything except single-family houses lament that they now can’t find anything but single-family houses as they try to downsize now.” Parochial zoning hurts us all, eventually.

* “He made a joke about land acknowledgements. Then the trouble began: When Professor Stuart Reges exercised his free speech rights, the University of Washington retaliated. So we’re suing the school.”

* “Why Study the History of Mathematics/Science?”

* Google has good, in-house desktop Linux.

* “Apple warns suppliers to follow China rules on ‘Taiwan’ labeling.” Remember: with Apple, 1984 won’t be like 1984. No word on what’s happening in 2024.

* “The High-Stakes Race to Engineer New Psychedelic Drugs.” It appears that the purpose of the race is primarily to find patentable drugs, because those are the only ones worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars on to get them through the FDA maze.

* “Why do we so consistently underestimate progress?”

* Argument that Google’s search results are now bad, which resonates with me: just now, I was trying to figure out whether there are still consistent problems with MacOS Monterey and Spotlight, and most of the results were blogspam.

Links: The need to build, the need for leadership, book banning, and more!

July 27, 2022 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* “The New Numbers on [New] Music Consumption Are Very Ugly.” Perhaps calling it “music consumption” is also ugly, relative to “listening to music?” Plus, music is not really “consumed:” it remains after it’s listened to.

* Argument that Twitter and social media aren’t the real problems bedeviling institutions. Not exactly my view—I’m closer to Haidt, I think—but interesting.

* Why can’t America build passenger trains? But, in good news, we may see NEPA reforms in the fall, which are likely necessary if we’re going to build the stuff we need.

* “College financial aid is a sham based on what colleges think families will pay.” Obvious, and yet not widely acknowledged as such. It does seem like more people that there is a lot of paying for the party and other kinds of problems going on in higher ed.

* On the global leadership deficit.

* “Corporate wokeness keeps falling short when it comes to China.”

* “Florida started penalizing bureaucratic delay. Housing permits spiked.” Some states are serious about human flourishing and livability; some aren’t. Rhetoric and reality often differ, too.

* An argument that the Russian economy is imploding.

* “Is It Worse to Ban a Book, or Never Publish It?” Which links notably to “The Many Faces of Literary Censorship: Censoriousness on the left increasingly joins moral panic on the right.” But, that said, I think the simple issue is that publishing books is being pushed aside by social media, a secular process that doesn’t seem to be slowing.

* Is everything—that is, everyone—getting old? Note:

There is one last possibility: that part of what we’re seeing is measurement error. If actors are getting older and the music we listen to is getting older, it may be because TikTok stars, Twitch streamers, and Roblox creators aren’t being counted among entertainers, even if they have a similar-sized audience. One thing that drags down the average age of Fortune 500 executives is when tech startups with young founders go public, but many of those startups don’t have the revenue to qualify for the Fortune 500, even if their market cap puts them in the S&P.

Some fields are rife with change and activity, while others are bureaucratic and sclerotic. I’m struck by how, for example, Robert Maynard Hutchins became the president of the University of Chicago at age 29 (don’t worry, this didn’t happen recently). Today, startups and tech seem to be the only places that judge on merit first and age later, if at all.

* Some peculiarities in a Dept. of Energy funding announcement, which is probably not of interest to most of you but may be to a few.

Links: News about the news, criticism about criticism, and more!

July 24, 2022 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* “I stopped reading the news. Is the problem me — or the product?” “The product,” mostly, although a lot of scientific and technical news is interesting. It’s possible to construct a mostly useful and interesting information universe, but it’s hard, and RSS feeds help. The most interesting stuff is rarely in the big publications, except Bloomberg and one or two others.

* We’re going to need a lot of solar panels.

* “How a Public School in Florida Built America’s Greatest Math Team.” Notice: “It turned out there was value in putting a bunch of smart kids in the same room: They feel empowered to make each other smarter.” Peer effects matter.

* “Criticism of criticism of criticism.” Read it carefully and think about it and it does make sense.

* The four quadrants of conformism.

* “Democrats in America are realising they must moderate or die: The prospect of defeat in the mid-terms and beyond is moving many away from their most radical ideas.” It seems obvious, and yet is somehow missed.

* Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes.

* Things about peer review, and a history of it. Consistent at least with my comments about peer review run amok.

* “How we will fight climate change.” “Technology” is the only feasible answer.

* The Framework modular laptop appears to be good.

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It — M. Nolan Gray

July 21, 2022 By in Books, Nonfiction Tags: , , Leave a comment

Arbitrary Lines is a very good book, and one whose subject shouldn’t discourage you; as the author admits: “At surface level, zoning is an impossibly boring topic, even by the terms of public policy debate.” The boredom is part of the point, though: because it’s boring, most people don’t get fired up about change. The tedium is protective to the status quo, and the tedium means that “seemingly innocuous zoning rules” have come to control “virtually every facet of American life.” As a result, we’re “systematically moving from high productivity cities to low-productivity cities, in no small part because these are the only places where zoning allows housing to be built.” I’m a tiny part of this massive migration: I moved from New York City to Arizona because New York builds less new housing per capita than almost any other major city, outside of California. The per-square-foot cost of my place in Arizona, in an area that is what passes for urban, is under half that of New York. I’d have liked to stay in New York but not at the literal cost of staying there.

arbitrary_lines_gray

Gray points to the ’70s as a turning point—something I wondered about too: “As a result of the further tightening of zoning restrictions beginning in the 1970s, median housing prices have dramatically outpaced median incomes in many parts of the country over the past half century.” Solutions like “move to the farthest exurbs” don’t work well because they increase car commuting and traffic congestion, with commuting being awful for quality-of-life. In many cities, there is effectively no more exurban fringe: New York and L.A. are out of space within practice reach of their centers. Nominal “environmentalists” who attempt to seal their neighborhoods from new housing units are particularly comedic: they say they’re worried about the environment, while supporting housing policies that are terrible for the environment and foment car commuting. All of us are hypocritical to some extent, but this is well beyond normal, everyday hypocrisy.

Gray goes through zoning’s history: starting in the 1910s and moving onwards. He notes that “Cities such as Providence, Cleveland, and Los Angles grew by a startling 50 percent or more between 1890 and 1920. This in turn triggered a boom in apartment construction, as demand for housing ballooned.” “Ballooned” is a funny word here, given that one can imagine the housing stock as cartoon balloons being inflated. But it’s also useful to conceive of what a dynamic society looks like: a dynamic allows the freedom for landowners to build new housing, without a huge number of veto players stopping them. Outside of the relatively unregulated tech industry—which is where the frontier has moved—we’re a complacent society, not a dynamic one, and housing is one of the places this is clearest (though drug development and the stranglehold imposed by the FDA is another).

In much discourse today, the “not-in-my-backyard” (NIMBY) contingent argues that things are changing “too fast,” whatever that may mean. NIMBYs who claim to be redressing historical racial grievances seem to miss that they’re willing to rapidly adopt new moral or social ideas, while being unwilling to countenance changes in the physical environment that really matter and might embody those moral or social ideas. They’re saying one thing, but not connecting those statements to each other. Much early zoning was about exclusion—Berkeley, California “introduced the first single-family zoning district in the United States,” and Gray reports that “Charles Henry Cheney, a key framer of Berkeley’s 1916 zoning ordinance” worried that “undesirable industries” would bring in “negroes and Orientals.” Today, Berkeley’s rhetoric favors racial harmony and integration, while Berkeley’s median housing price is $1.7 million. Almost no one seems to see the gap between the stated goals. The rationale for modern zoning is different from the original rationale, but the outcome is similar.

Gray worked, and maybe works, in urban planning, so he has stories about its absurdities. There’s a 30,000 foot view of how things work, and there’s an on-the-ground-view, and he’s done both. I appreciate the combination: having worked for decades in grant writing, I see things about the world of nonprofits and public agencies that most people don’t. Like zoning, few are interested in how many nonprofits and public agencies are funded and truly operate. The knowledge is out there, mostly ignored, except by the wonks who can find one another online.

The middle sections of Arbitrary Lines, about how restricting housing supply raises prices, will be familiar to regular readers, or to anyone familiar with basic economics (which excludes a large number of people who think other factors are somehow at play—though we see the supply-restriction story in the data). I’m tempted to quote extensively, but this is a solid “man does not bite dog” story: what one would expect to happen, has happened, helping to lower aggregate wealth and make life harder for millions of people. Gray also has a picture of yard signs, one saying “All are welcome” and another “opposing zoning liberalization in Austin.” There are fun study citations, like that “the typical resident of Vermont—renowned for its commitment to environmentalist causes—consumes three and a half times as much gasoline per year as the typical resident of New York City.” Most people follow their feelings, not data, and so we get the results we get. Still, the affordability crisis has gotten bad enough that we’re starting to see policy responses, and books like Arbitrary Lines should help inform the kinds of staffers who write and encourage legislation.

What can be done? I approve of efforts to enforce change at the state level and hope they succeed, though I wonder if it’s going to take technological innovation to see substantial improvements. Self-driving cars will lower the cost of current zoning, because true self-driving cars would allow us to reallocate most of the vast amount of urban, developed space reserved for parking into something else. The car allowed the exclusionary suburbs of the post-war era to bloom, and the self-driving car may remove the mania for mandating the over-provision of parking spaces. The High Cost of Free Parking is a great, surprising book about a subject that seems as boring as zoning, and yet one that also affects almost every aspect of how we live—including our health.

If this essay seems like too much a summary of the book, that’s because the book is thorough and comprehensive, and apart from some anecdotes I have too little to add. “Zoning” may be invisible, but its results are visible all around us. We pay supernormal amounts to live in areas built before zoning strangled our ability to create functional cities. Human flourishing would increase if Gray’s ideas became widely adopted. Inertia and complacency stand in the way. We can live better, if we choose to.