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List of Initial Planks
Here is the first list of planks or building blocks for the discussion of explanations and explanatory models. It is likely incomplete but that is not fatal:
- All explanations (and models – a term I subsume within “explanation”) are stories;
- Concepts such as “reality”, “actual”, “real”, “truth”, “true”, “fact” or “exists” are of no relevance as generic undefined concepts;
- All stories are provisional and are expected to change, be updated, altered and added to (or subtracted from);
- The measure of a “good story” versus a “bad story” is whether or not and to what extent it fulfils its purpose;
- The correspondence of a story to anything else – most noticeably to “objective reality” is irrelevant, likely unmeasurable and often unhelpful; and,
- A purpose is a specified intent of some kind and may have a short or long life, may be broad or narrow and may be familiar or unfamiliar and much else.
Given that some sort of beginning is required, this will start things moving.
Some other points will be set out to amplify the above. These will also be incomplete, but their purpose is to lend some flesh to the bare bones laid out above.
Why reform is demanding
As NZ struggles to reform the RMA, some idea of the impact of NIMBY problems as well as the catyclismic events required to nullify them can gained from this:
The London Blitz and the NIMBYs
by Tyler Cowen December 11, 2021 at 2:16 pm in
NIMBYs can be so bad that they make the London Blitz look good:
We exploit locally exogenous variation from the Blitz bombings to quantify the effect of redevelopment frictions and identify agglomeration economies at a micro-geographic scale. Employing rich location and office rental transaction data, we estimate reduced-form analyses and a spatial general equilibrium model. Our analyses demonstrate that more heavily bombed areas exhibit taller buildings today, and that agglomeration elasticities in London are large, approaching 0.2. Counterfactual simulations show that if the Blitz had not occurred, the concomitant reduction in agglomeration economies arising from the loss of higher-density redevelopment would cause London’s present-day gross domestic product to drop by some 10% (or £50 billion).
Here is the full paper by Gerard H Dericks and Hans R A Koster, via tekl.
Eye2theLongRun 