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A review by lpm100
San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger
5.0
Book Review
Sanfransicko
5/5 stars
"Policy Mistakes; A country tears itself apart owing to frivolity"
If I had to give the Short Attention Span Essential Cautionary Tales from this book, they would be something like.....
Primo: "If you find yourself in a position where some Fabulous White People are trying to turn you into a victim or a vanity project....... RUN AWAY. RUN FAR. RUN FAST. Do the exact opposite of what they advise, and you just might be okay."
Secundo: "If some Fabulous White People are trying to sell a mass movement and their first point of contact is black people, then that's how you know that they're just looking for some useful idiots / patsies on which to experiment." (Jim Jones sent a whole lot of black people to commit mass suicide; [p.175] the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest rioters were 98 to 99% white and they didn't even live in Seattle.)
*******
The upshot of This Book Is that addiction and mental illness are core drivers of homelessness, and some extreme left-wing cities have bound their own feet because incarcerating drug addicts or institutionalizing homeless is a violation of their freedom, but then the same mentally ill people are too much so to be responsible for their actions. (p.235)
*******
A lot of other things to think about here.
The first thing is that hoped-for policy results are not the same thing as ACTUAL policy results.
The second is that Shellenberger does not take statistics at face value, and instead he goes and reads them in comparison to other comparable cases. (I have read another of his works and he was also very thorough in that way.)
The third thing is that when progressives talk a big talk about caring for the "common man," they are often disingenuous.
A lot of potential solutions (that I see), but none will happen:
1. Loser pays legislation. If you really believe that you have a case to be made, then you will but if you don't then you will not be able to scare people into submission by filing a bunch of frivolous lawsuits about things that have nothing to do with you.
2. Academic freedom is a VERY destructive thing and is/could be / should be understood as a matter of national security: per unit of space/time, universities are the most prolific generators of robust stupid ideas ever.
(The First Emperor of the world's longest lived country, China, was well aware of the damage that Professional Jabberers can do to a country: Destroying that which has been built/never building anything themselves/making conditions such that nothing useful can be built OR maintained. His strategy was not subtle but effective: He just buried them alive. Of course, no one these days advocates doing that but.... one can see his point. And China is still with us 23 centuries later.)
Second order thoughts:
*Much here can only be explained by the malign influence of the Chattering Class:
1. Extremely bizarre obsessions with policies if they happen to have racially disparate impact. (p.80).
2. In the world of intellectuals, nature and reality just don't exist if they get in the way of some silly idea of moment. And this appears to be enough to explain why various government arms are completely impervious to / unaware of feedback mechanisms to evaluate the merit of different policies.
*If you don't know whether you're not you are on the receiving end of Help That Is Not Help, your first clue should be the fact that: some Fabulous White People try to turn you into a Victim. (And they can therefore put themselves in the role of Rescuer.)
In this book's particular case, it is them trying to turn people with mental illness or substance abuse problems into victims of circumstance. (Native Americans have been "victims" / wards of the states for several centuries, and they have never regained their equilibrium. Blacks are eternal "victims of racism," with all of the corresponding self-destructive/self defeating / self-sabotaging mentalities that that entails.)
*Words are tremendously powerful--and destructive-- things. "Bum" is no longer a word because it could call attention to personal failures. Instead, it becomes "homeless" in order to paint anybody as a victim of anything. And of course, it is easy to mix the apples and oranges of people that are genuinely poor with those who are drug addicts/mental patients.
Creating statements that are logically consistent with each other (but have no basis in empirical reality) is a great way to convince large numbers of people to do stupid things.
Chapter summary:
1. Discussion of statistics that compare the worst outcomes in San Francisco to many other metropolises, as well as demonstrating that efforts in that specific place have been futile.
2. Progressivist/public activists keep the courtrooms tied up agitating for the right of people to defecate in the streets. Most of the homeless are drug addicts, and will refuse housing Services even though San Francisco spends far more per homeless person ($31,985/per) than every other place with a homeless problem.
3. Progressive and even moderate Democrats much prefer permanent housing to temporary shelter. But, for obvious reasons, the amount of tax money that can be extracted for a permanent house for every single homeless person is limited and temporary shelter could be provided for everybody--and also a supply of Free housing would probably generate its own demand (=more homeless). But permanent housing, only a small fraction. Health outcomes are identical between the two strategies.
4. Between the two strategies of harm reduction and mandatory treatment, San Francisco as chosen the former with disastrous results. The war on drugs is not nearly enough to explain the dramatic increase in prison population.
5. San Francisco has gone beyond harm reduction, even to the point of paying for billboards promoting the safe use of heroin and making police free open air drug markets.
6. Public policy is finding the right combination of treatment and law enforcement against drugs (given here by the Dutch example). The wrong combination (such as open-air drug markets but no mandatory treatment) leads to lots of homelessness.
7. Low reimbursement rates do not encourage providers to specialize in areas relevant to homeless people. The number of psychiatric beds per 100,000 people is even only a third of where it needs to be.
8. Brief description of the intellectual currents that created the antipsychiatry movement popular in California.
9. The ACLU is the cause of a lot of these problems. (As they are for MANY other problems.) They don't want involuntary psychiatric hospitalization, nor do they want the laws enforced on public defecation.
10. A lot of Old Wine in New Bottles: i)"structural racism" as a catch all explanation for anything and everything; ii) Fabulous White People treating homeless / recidivists as victims because then that gives them a reason to be Fabulous White People.
11. Very clear discussion of the psychological role play of Victims, Persecutors, and Rescuers. When people have it drummed into their heads that they are victims, then that is a way to stunt recovery from drug addiction / other problems.
12. The increase in violence after the George Floyd riots were likely attributable to a bunch of people sitting at home with no work and nothing else to do. Roland Fryer has done some work to show that there is actually no racial bias in police shooting, popular misconceptions notwithstanding.
13. There is no consistent relationship between poverty/opression/unemployment, because all of those things have been going down and crime rates of change many times.
14. As States lose legitimacy / bow and scrape in front of their citizens (by weak laws / inconsistent law enforcement), citizens become more unafraid to use violence. (Amazing that an author actually had to use a chapter to clarify this, given that everybody except academics knows this.)
Notice that CHAZ/CHOP Seattle was in response to a weak and accommodating mayor but things like that did not happen in relatively more law and order strong Chicago.More black people end up dead when police stop doing their job than ones who end up shot to death at the hands of police. Usually a couple of orders of magnitude difference.
15. People with the Dark Triad Personality (psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism) find welcome fodder to create destruction by getting the misplaced religious impulses of compassionate/ idealistic idiots.
In reality, 99% of funds allocated to help homeless goes into the pockets of middleman/inspectors / contractors / lawyers/lobbyists/labor unions--an actual homeless people are a distant second. (Can you believe that porta potties near homeless camps cost $320,000 each?)
16. "When we debunk a fanatical faith or prejudice, we do not strike at the root of fanaticism. We merely prevent its leaking out at a certain point, with the likely result that it will leak out at some other point." So, as regions become less traditionally religious than they just find non-traditional religions to fill the void. (Jim Jones didn't come out of nowhere.)
17. Nobody wants to pass legislation to build new houses because they don't want to see the value of (their) existing houses go down. Support for black/ homeless people is a declared preference but voting against building affordable housing for the same is a revealed preference.
18. Author outlines his solution to the problems. (That will never happen, because that many vested interest groups just cannot be moved. It's going to start taking until some number of government officials children get raped or murdered enough times.)
19. 95% of land in California is off limits to developers. United states/america is probably an example of a society that has become too comfortable and is generating conflicts to tear itself apart. (Kind of the same way a person who lives on the sofa eating luxurious foods all day becomes flabby and weak.)
Verdict:
Recommended, but at $5.
1. To be honest, I've read so many books about democracies "wasting, exhausting, and murdering" themselves that one more is pretty low value added.
2. Some of these policy choices / legal rulings are just statistical errors. (If you have so many rulings/legislations, then some number will be wrong. )
Even when a society/ country as aggressive as China makes policy choices, and some of them are bad and not every single problem can be solved. (For instance, they have a serious problem with sex imbalance as well as a rapidly aging population because of several decades of the One Child Policy - - which making a Three Child Policy will not magically reverse.)
California's / San Francisco's idiocy is not a special case.
3. Governments of all types eventually reach problems that they just cannot solve because it's beyond their technical ability. This is been happening for many thousands of years, and San Francisco / California are just two more tiny data points in the absurdity.
New word: Pathological altruism. (p.143).
Sanfransicko
5/5 stars
"Policy Mistakes; A country tears itself apart owing to frivolity"
If I had to give the Short Attention Span Essential Cautionary Tales from this book, they would be something like.....
Primo: "If you find yourself in a position where some Fabulous White People are trying to turn you into a victim or a vanity project....... RUN AWAY. RUN FAR. RUN FAST. Do the exact opposite of what they advise, and you just might be okay."
Secundo: "If some Fabulous White People are trying to sell a mass movement and their first point of contact is black people, then that's how you know that they're just looking for some useful idiots / patsies on which to experiment." (Jim Jones sent a whole lot of black people to commit mass suicide; [p.175] the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest rioters were 98 to 99% white and they didn't even live in Seattle.)
*******
The upshot of This Book Is that addiction and mental illness are core drivers of homelessness, and some extreme left-wing cities have bound their own feet because incarcerating drug addicts or institutionalizing homeless is a violation of their freedom, but then the same mentally ill people are too much so to be responsible for their actions. (p.235)
*******
A lot of other things to think about here.
The first thing is that hoped-for policy results are not the same thing as ACTUAL policy results.
The second is that Shellenberger does not take statistics at face value, and instead he goes and reads them in comparison to other comparable cases. (I have read another of his works and he was also very thorough in that way.)
The third thing is that when progressives talk a big talk about caring for the "common man," they are often disingenuous.
A lot of potential solutions (that I see), but none will happen:
1. Loser pays legislation. If you really believe that you have a case to be made, then you will but if you don't then you will not be able to scare people into submission by filing a bunch of frivolous lawsuits about things that have nothing to do with you.
2. Academic freedom is a VERY destructive thing and is/could be / should be understood as a matter of national security: per unit of space/time, universities are the most prolific generators of robust stupid ideas ever.
(The First Emperor of the world's longest lived country, China, was well aware of the damage that Professional Jabberers can do to a country: Destroying that which has been built/never building anything themselves/making conditions such that nothing useful can be built OR maintained. His strategy was not subtle but effective: He just buried them alive. Of course, no one these days advocates doing that but.... one can see his point. And China is still with us 23 centuries later.)
Second order thoughts:
*Much here can only be explained by the malign influence of the Chattering Class:
1. Extremely bizarre obsessions with policies if they happen to have racially disparate impact. (p.80).
2. In the world of intellectuals, nature and reality just don't exist if they get in the way of some silly idea of moment. And this appears to be enough to explain why various government arms are completely impervious to / unaware of feedback mechanisms to evaluate the merit of different policies.
*If you don't know whether you're not you are on the receiving end of Help That Is Not Help, your first clue should be the fact that: some Fabulous White People try to turn you into a Victim. (And they can therefore put themselves in the role of Rescuer.)
In this book's particular case, it is them trying to turn people with mental illness or substance abuse problems into victims of circumstance. (Native Americans have been "victims" / wards of the states for several centuries, and they have never regained their equilibrium. Blacks are eternal "victims of racism," with all of the corresponding self-destructive/self defeating / self-sabotaging mentalities that that entails.)
*Words are tremendously powerful--and destructive-- things. "Bum" is no longer a word because it could call attention to personal failures. Instead, it becomes "homeless" in order to paint anybody as a victim of anything. And of course, it is easy to mix the apples and oranges of people that are genuinely poor with those who are drug addicts/mental patients.
Creating statements that are logically consistent with each other (but have no basis in empirical reality) is a great way to convince large numbers of people to do stupid things.
Chapter summary:
1. Discussion of statistics that compare the worst outcomes in San Francisco to many other metropolises, as well as demonstrating that efforts in that specific place have been futile.
2. Progressivist/public activists keep the courtrooms tied up agitating for the right of people to defecate in the streets. Most of the homeless are drug addicts, and will refuse housing Services even though San Francisco spends far more per homeless person ($31,985/per) than every other place with a homeless problem.
3. Progressive and even moderate Democrats much prefer permanent housing to temporary shelter. But, for obvious reasons, the amount of tax money that can be extracted for a permanent house for every single homeless person is limited and temporary shelter could be provided for everybody--and also a supply of Free housing would probably generate its own demand (=more homeless). But permanent housing, only a small fraction. Health outcomes are identical between the two strategies.
4. Between the two strategies of harm reduction and mandatory treatment, San Francisco as chosen the former with disastrous results. The war on drugs is not nearly enough to explain the dramatic increase in prison population.
5. San Francisco has gone beyond harm reduction, even to the point of paying for billboards promoting the safe use of heroin and making police free open air drug markets.
6. Public policy is finding the right combination of treatment and law enforcement against drugs (given here by the Dutch example). The wrong combination (such as open-air drug markets but no mandatory treatment) leads to lots of homelessness.
7. Low reimbursement rates do not encourage providers to specialize in areas relevant to homeless people. The number of psychiatric beds per 100,000 people is even only a third of where it needs to be.
8. Brief description of the intellectual currents that created the antipsychiatry movement popular in California.
9. The ACLU is the cause of a lot of these problems. (As they are for MANY other problems.) They don't want involuntary psychiatric hospitalization, nor do they want the laws enforced on public defecation.
10. A lot of Old Wine in New Bottles: i)"structural racism" as a catch all explanation for anything and everything; ii) Fabulous White People treating homeless / recidivists as victims because then that gives them a reason to be Fabulous White People.
11. Very clear discussion of the psychological role play of Victims, Persecutors, and Rescuers. When people have it drummed into their heads that they are victims, then that is a way to stunt recovery from drug addiction / other problems.
12. The increase in violence after the George Floyd riots were likely attributable to a bunch of people sitting at home with no work and nothing else to do. Roland Fryer has done some work to show that there is actually no racial bias in police shooting, popular misconceptions notwithstanding.
13. There is no consistent relationship between poverty/opression/unemployment, because all of those things have been going down and crime rates of change many times.
14. As States lose legitimacy / bow and scrape in front of their citizens (by weak laws / inconsistent law enforcement), citizens become more unafraid to use violence. (Amazing that an author actually had to use a chapter to clarify this, given that everybody except academics knows this.)
Notice that CHAZ/CHOP Seattle was in response to a weak and accommodating mayor but things like that did not happen in relatively more law and order strong Chicago.More black people end up dead when police stop doing their job than ones who end up shot to death at the hands of police. Usually a couple of orders of magnitude difference.
15. People with the Dark Triad Personality (psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism) find welcome fodder to create destruction by getting the misplaced religious impulses of compassionate/ idealistic idiots.
In reality, 99% of funds allocated to help homeless goes into the pockets of middleman/inspectors / contractors / lawyers/lobbyists/labor unions--an actual homeless people are a distant second. (Can you believe that porta potties near homeless camps cost $320,000 each?)
16. "When we debunk a fanatical faith or prejudice, we do not strike at the root of fanaticism. We merely prevent its leaking out at a certain point, with the likely result that it will leak out at some other point." So, as regions become less traditionally religious than they just find non-traditional religions to fill the void. (Jim Jones didn't come out of nowhere.)
17. Nobody wants to pass legislation to build new houses because they don't want to see the value of (their) existing houses go down. Support for black/ homeless people is a declared preference but voting against building affordable housing for the same is a revealed preference.
18. Author outlines his solution to the problems. (That will never happen, because that many vested interest groups just cannot be moved. It's going to start taking until some number of government officials children get raped or murdered enough times.)
19. 95% of land in California is off limits to developers. United states/america is probably an example of a society that has become too comfortable and is generating conflicts to tear itself apart. (Kind of the same way a person who lives on the sofa eating luxurious foods all day becomes flabby and weak.)
Verdict:
Recommended, but at $5.
1. To be honest, I've read so many books about democracies "wasting, exhausting, and murdering" themselves that one more is pretty low value added.
2. Some of these policy choices / legal rulings are just statistical errors. (If you have so many rulings/legislations, then some number will be wrong. )
Even when a society/ country as aggressive as China makes policy choices, and some of them are bad and not every single problem can be solved. (For instance, they have a serious problem with sex imbalance as well as a rapidly aging population because of several decades of the One Child Policy - - which making a Three Child Policy will not magically reverse.)
California's / San Francisco's idiocy is not a special case.
3. Governments of all types eventually reach problems that they just cannot solve because it's beyond their technical ability. This is been happening for many thousands of years, and San Francisco / California are just two more tiny data points in the absurdity.
New word: Pathological altruism. (p.143).