"Reforms have to justify themselves in a way that the status quo never does." -@JohnFPfaff on The Weeds podcast
This is the best formulation I've seen of a problem that bedevils America on countless fronts:
-Criminal justice
-Clean energy
-Transportation
-Housing, etc.
"Yeah, what's happening right now is terrible, but think of how it *might* be worse if we change it."
😐
Seriously, you should listen to this episode (and read @JohnFPfaff's excellent book, "Locked In").
"The question isn't whether police reduce crime. It does, but at an extreme social cost."
"Every cost-benefit analysis of policing evaluates the crime reducing benefit of policing against the *budgetary* cost of policing, which means that George Floyd's death doesn't event show up."
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There will always be "just one more project" to do.
There's always a chokepoint that "needs" widening, a winding segment that "needs" straightening, or a freeway interchange that "needs" an additional connection.
It's the classic '10 hot dogs 8 buns' problem:
"I've got 2 extra hot dogs so I need to buy more buns. I've got 6 extra buns..."
Except it's:
"We widened this segment, we now have a chokepoint we have to fix. Oh, and now we have a chokepoint further downstream that we...."
In that world, every day at lunch and dinner time, lines for pizza restaurants world stretch around the block. No matter how much someone wanted pizza, he had to wait.
@elonmusk@cyrusposting Pizza engineers worked tirelessly, trying to make the pizza system exceeded public pizza demand, but every time they opened a new pizza restaurant, it filled up.
@elonmusk@cyrusposting The new people in line were those who had been dissuaded from waiting in a long line before and had been eating elsewhere. But they a new free pizza restaurant and they flooded it, making the line as long as anywhere else.
Experts began calling this "induced pizza demand."