Who gets to decide, and how

Our existing processes for how we decide what is allowed when there is disagreement are a key reason its hard to build things in the USA today. Over the last week, Marc Dunkelman and Alex Mechanick wrote an interesting pair of substacks grappling with this question. Dunkelman is concerned that abundance will require empowering someone to make decisions that not everyone will agree with (a decision he thinks not everyone will agree with!). He argues housing reforms have been successful in large part because they have implicitly selected someone to make a decision, in this case the property owner who decides whether or not to build more densely on land they own. But he points out the same trick won’t work with infrastructure that spans many parcels, like transmission or rail lines. In those cases, a centralized authority will need to make decisions about whose interests win out, and empowering a central authority to make those decisions runs counter to some liberal sensibilities. Meanwhile, Alex Mechanick asks how it can be simultaneously true that the government faces so many veto points that it cannot enact its decisions, but also is so unconstrained by process that it risks autocracy. The resolution for Mechanick is that many procedural checks are badly designed; they don’t constrain in cases where they ought to, and in other cases create delays, uncertainties, and costs, without offering much in the way of benefits. I’m inclined to think the kinds of procedural checks on government are the way we, in fact, make decisions about how to balance competing interests. As I see it, a key focus of the abundance agenda is that (1) these processes don’t work that well and (2) they implicitly put too little weight on the virtues of long-run growth, by making it easy for incumbents to veto projects whose net benefits are large and positive.