What Nicholas Kristof’s recent article, “What Have We Liberals Done to the West Coast?,” makes too apparent is that Oregon must thank the stars (its supreme court) for disqualifying Kristof from the state’s 2022 race for governor. This man is not a part of the solution. He really is at the heart of that state’s problems, which stem from the perpetuation of a social structure with distributional commitments that are far from rational or, put another way, optimal.
Oregon, in this regard, is in the same boat as California, Washington, and, with some minor modifications, British Columbia. This is the Left Coast. A region whose cities, until very recently, pushed for social policies that defied what people like Kristof characterized as commonsense. Their conventional feeling of a political middle (not too far right, not too far left), however, is no longer in the center-right (there is only a right now); it’s entirely in a center-left that counts progressives and socialists as its neighbors. Kristof is on the right of the center-left. The same goes for a good chunk of Seattle’s current city council. And how does this group hope to fix the West Coast? Reestablishing the Reagan-era policies that, precisely, proved to be a distributional disaster for most Americans.
“What Have We Liberals Done to the West Coast?” begins with what its author imagines to be the core centrist question: “Why put liberals in charge nationally when the places where they have greatest control are plagued by homelessness, crime and dysfunction?” Kristof admits that blue states do perform better than red states when it comes to not inconsequential things such as “life expectancy,” “child poverty,” and “education.” The problem, therefore, mostly has to do with blue states in the West. This region of America is, according to Kristof, a total disaster: too many homeless people, weak mental health services, and high crime (Portland’s homicide rate dusts New York City’s). Why has the West Coast become so ungovernable? On top of reading too much Ibram X. Kendi, and lacking Republicans to counterbalance leftist power, Kristof argues that West Coast’s progressives are indifferent “to the laws of economics.”
Good article.
The West Coast is an absolute mess. Liberals cannot govern. They can win elections, but they can’t govern.
What Have We Liberals Done to the West Coast? https://t.co/7UusjkHJJw
— Jeff Hard Author (@AuthorHard) June 16, 2024
After describing all of the bad things happening to everyone on the West Coast, Kristof opens the curtains with this sentence: “What matters is improving opportunities and quality of life, and the best path to do that is a relentless empiricism — which clashes with the West Coast’s indifference to the laws of economics.” Our columnist is clearly under the impression that economics is as natural as a tree or a cloud in the sky. Such a view can only conclude that distributional issues are best settled if they are left alone. Interventionism, particularly the aggressive kind promoted by progressives and socialists, can only make matters worse.
Kristof writes:
The basic reason for homelessness on the West Coast is an enormous shortage of housing that drives up rents. California lacks about three million housing units, in part because it’s difficult to get permission to build.
He then rejects social housing because the government is not as efficient as the market. This is not, of course, economics in the scientific (meaning natural) sense imagined by mainstream media and academia. It is just plain old Reaganomics. Big government is bad and wasteful. The market is quick and resourceful. That sort of claptrap. But if economics is to live up to its name (the rational management of wealth), then it first has to delink its program from a form of growth that knows no limit. As long as the two are connected, we will continue to confuse it with things like balanced budgets, welfare cuts, and unregulated markets. We will also continue to define economic success as a growth rate that’s 2% or higher. One percent (or, god forbid, negative) growth is a disaster. The public must fear a recession more than death. This dreadful feeling makes sense because it’s very much like unlimited growth. Both are metaphysical.
The West Coast, however, is far from poor or anything resembling a recession. The five largest corporations “by market capitalization,” for example, call this region home: Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Google, and Amazon. Their combined financial value surpasses the combined GDP of Germany, Japan, and Great Britain. And so, if there’s poverty here, it can’t be attributed to a lack of capital. It is instead structural. Or owes its realization to a configuration space whose compossibles make the physical productions of poverty (homelessness, underfunded schools, crime) possible.
Note: I use, in my system, configuration space in a sense considerably altered from its source, physics; and compossible in a sense borrowed without alteration from the German rationalist philosopher Leibniz. The former (which the economist Joan Robinson called, in her post-Keynesian system, “the rules of the game“), defines the virtuality that pre-shapes reality; the latter, the movement from the virtual to the real. In short, my system describes the virtual (a space shaped by culturally determined laws and policies) as equal with (if not more important than) what results from its shaping: low wages, billionaires, life expectancy drops. Some call this virtual/compossible process social engineering.
On top of all this, many of the cities on the West Coast experienced a construction boom in the years before the lockdown. The market was given pretty much free rein but it spectacularly failed (and didn’t care) to meet the huge demand for affordable housing. Almost all that went up were luxury apartment buildings, some of which are now empty or incomplete. But, of course, common sense does not register overproduction or compound growth as wasteful.
There is a bus stop next to the intersection of Yesler Way and 23rd Avenue that tells the whole story. Behind this place of waiting is Douglass-Truth Library. But that’s not what I want to point out. What’s of significance is, one, Metro’s real-time sign at the bus stop, and, two, the intersection’s stop lights. Though both are operated by the government, the lights work, and the sign is dead—and probably has been so for more than six months. How are we to explain this sorry state of affairs? By configuration space and compossiblity.
The virtual that makes the automobile experience possible is far richer, in terms of compossibles (related or linked or corresponding possibilities), than that which results in the experience of public transportation. The dearth of the latter means many of its productions are stillborn or die prematurely. A richness in compossibles presents a force in the transition to reality that’s politically hard to overwhelm. But progressive programs (such as public transportation) are doomed to enter a hostile reality with little to no force. And so when they visibly struggle (or in the case of the real-time sign, totally fail), they, rather than their conditions of presentation, are blamed. This is nothing but the bottom of Kristof’s reading of the Left Coast. Oregon must thank its lucky stars.
“He then rejects social housing because the government is not as efficient as the market. This is not, of course, economics in the scientific (meaning natural) sense imagined by mainstream media and academia. It is just plain old Reaganomics. Big government is bad and wasteful. The market is quick and resourceful. That sort of claptrap.”
I’m finding it hard to square this with this morning’s Slog A.M. post, which explained that Seattle’s social housing development initiative is struggling to meet the deadlines necessary to getting funding measures on the fall ballot.
As someone who grew up in New York State, lived in NYC, lived in Seattle, and has lived in Oregon for almost a decade now, I AM grateful that Nicholas Kristof is not our governor.
I also know full well that while the west coast loves to believe it’s a bastion of liberal freedom, it is not. Most of the west coast is rar-right red and if it weren’t for Seattle and Portland in WA in OR and all of the non-white people living in CA, the west coast would be bloody fucking red red red. FFS 2/3 of Oregon wants to secede to Idaho (instead of just, you know, MOVING TO IDAHO).
The biggest problem with the west coast (having lived on both coasts and been raised on the east coast) is the talking. So much fucking talking and very little ACTION. When I lived in Seattle there were at least 4 votes (to build it) years of talking about building it, over $70 MILLION spent on talking about building it, and to date, a monorail has never been built in the city of Seattle (beyond the toy ride of Seattle Center).
There’s just as much corruption and incompetence on both coasts.
I’d say the west coast is more incompetent and the east coast is more corrupt, if it must be parsed out.
I just spent a week in Copenhagen. Democratic socialism works. America is broken.
“Reestablishing the Reagan-era policies?”
What horseshit. There is nothing in there about such polices. He basically points to two big failings in the West Coast:
1) Housing. He then lays the blame right at the feet of where anyone with any sense would lay it: Zoning. The folks who think that the problem can be solved with social housing ignore one simple fact: You can’t build enough social housing without changing the zoning! Seriously Charles. I get where you might want huge housing developments in places like Magnolia or Wallingford, let alone the north end. But we can’t build there unless the zoning changes! It can’t be done. Your plans are bullshit fantasy, whereas Kristof suggests ideas that have had success in places like Germany, Japan, Montreal and fucking Texas. It is this last example that he is getting at. Why the fuck does Texas have fewer homeless than California? The cost of housing is cheaper. Why is housing cheaper? Zoning. When it comes to being conservative, you actually have it backwards. When it comes to zoning, Seattle is much more conservative than any city in Japan, and is now more conservative than Spokane. The result? Really high housing, despite decent levels of spending on social housing.
2) The lack of a center-right. There is no check on large systems. It is quite common to build this, and then turn around and say “Well, it is much better than what the Republicans would do” because the Republicans are fucking loons. There is no conservatives in the Republican Party — only reactionaries and nationalists. There are conservatives in the Democratic Party, but because the Republican Party is so full of shit — and successful — they are rarely opposed.
Consider transportation. We spend way too much on new highways. The Puget Sound Gateway Project will cost several billions dollars. It will add very little, while leaving us with an ever bigger maintenance budget. But it is tiny compared to the Columbia River Crossing project. This is a massive program that is being pushed through will little opposition despite the extremely high cost. In a more civilized country there would be a lot more publicity about alternatives. There would be an alliance between Greens and fiscal conservatives to build something much smaller and better. Or consider ST3. There has been very little scrutiny of these projects because the right wing is nutty enough to claim that we should spend nothing on transit and those in power don’t know shit about transit. So we will spend somewhere over 50 billion dollars for shitty transit. Worse yet, folks in the media (including places like The Stranger) ignore the actual value of such projects, and just assume everything we build is worth it (while the other side argues the opposite). Nuance is lost.
@4
The lack of a center-right.?
How about the lack of a center anything?
Both parties have moved so far away from the center that neither represents anyone except for those at the far ends of the political spectrum.
@2
Thank you!
I still have my monorail coffee cup (and a monorail poster).
And any rational government would have built Sound Transit through Southcenter, and extended MAX to Vancouver WA 10 years ago.
But no! Wait till they break the 1 line through Seattle into 2 lines, for some inscrutable reason.
Why would “the market” address the needs of people with no money?
@3. Good times! Did you check out Reffen?
@2 “The biggest problem with the west coast (having lived on both coasts and been raised on the east coast) is the talking. So much fucking talking and very little ACTION.”
Preach.
@4 likewise to everything you wrote
@7 why indeed?? Can’t possibly be that the american economic system entails perverse incentives only potentially mitigated by state action…
The most disturbing part of Kristof’s article was this:
“One of my school friends in my hometown, Yamhill, Ore., Stacy, struggled with alcoholism and mental illness. She became homeless and lived in a tent in a park, but it is almost impossible in such cases to move someone involuntarily into an institution. So she froze to death one winter night.
…
I think of Stacy suffering and dying unnecessarily, and I believe that instead of protecting her, our liberalism failed her.”
As if the only way to “help” such a person is to involuntarily confine them, and that opposition to such a policy (“liberalism”) “failed” the person.
Either that or the main photo accompanying the article (https://tinyurl.com/47bnt8y9) of destitute people sleeping rough in a massive lawn behind a suburban development.
@2 xina, @6 pat L, and @10 thirteen12: +3 for the WIN!!!
Thank you for nailing it.
As for Nicholas Krystof, I just scroll down and ignore any of his Op-Ed commentary. I have been doing so ever since his big line of ‘Let’s give [Trump] a chance’ in The Seattle Times, immediately after the disastrous election of November 8, 2016.
@12. Hahahahahahaha
@2 “I’d say the west coast is more incompetent and the east coast is more corrupt, if it must be parsed out.”
As a sweeping generalization I think that’s essentially correct. In big Northeastern cities, palms get greased and stuff gets done. But civic life is coarser and the bureaucratic maze (having had more time to develop) is more elaborate and confounding to outsiders. Pick your poison.
@12 You’re a farting cow, so it makes sense you’d have a problem with that.
@8 Yep. Rode my rental bike to Reffen for some Iranian street food and then back along the Norddyssen path to Christainia and Church of our Saviour.
Nicholas Kristof is a blight. It’s like he took his rejection by the state of Oregon and is now going to let everyone know that he knows everything and is right about it all and nobody else knows anything. Just today, equating Biden & Trump as serious people that he can scold equally, wtaf
This is one of the most self-important and unintelligible pieces of writing I have ever read.