What If We Knew the Same Facts, and Still Disagreed?

On rent protection, investor flight, and the right to take the shot even when the odds say don’t.

There is an element of desperation when communities push for rent protection in a way that makes investors go away.

But I disagree that it’s necessarily illogical.

I hate it when the monied opposition tries to frame it like a law of nature and that if we only knew all the facts we’d agree with them.

Assume that I know all the same things. For me, I often take risks in “nothing-to-lose” scenarios, and what counts as a “lose” is personal, subjective, like a favorite song or poem.

I’m wired to enjoy Hail Mary shots to move the norm on economics when an op presents itself, which is rare.

And I’m okay doing this even at risk of things getting worse for a while. That’s a trade-off, weighed subjectively.

I simply love the pure aesthetic value of communities fighting back to decide how they want to die.

Option One: Go down fighting, to try and survive capital flight, just to see if we can make history. You never know. There’s a first time for everything. Just ask the Wright brothers.

Option Two: Succumb to the cancer of Blackstone and private equity, and let NYC become oligarch brat island so that investors who never step foot in MY HOME, MY COMMUNITY, can make an extra 3-5% IRR.

Notice, there’s nothing illogical there, per se. Just a different set of values.

Here’s another: sometimes a little central planning of markets is part of the game, like one of those cue stick wedge thingies that you have to use to hit the weird faraway shot on the pool table.

But when you suggest a smidge of regulation, absolutists run the same old recording: “any time you interfere with market forces instead of blah blah blah…”

They love to point out the bloody history of market interference. As if lazy appeals to history are a substitute for rigorous analysis in the present.

So let me understand this: if UNCLE BUBBA loses a few fingers on the old table saw, does that mean we don’t ever get to use the table saw again?

Fine. But maybe Bubba got into the damn vodka before he attempted to sculpt the wood, and also maybe Bubba is an inbred idiot.

So maybe don’t let his blood-soaked stump be a cautionary tale against ever using power tools again. That’s stupid.

Markets are not natural law. They are machines. They are beautiful and smart. But if you’ve ever had a beautiful and smart machine in your life, you know they jam, get overheated, fail, need a Fonzie smack. When that happens, there are lots of tools we can use to keep things humming.

Market interference is one of many tools proven to work in the right scenario. But if you say that out loud you get the libertarian bumper sticker screamed in your ear: “It’s called supply and demand, dummy!”

(Sigh.) Like my aunt used to say, it’s like “quoting gravity to settle an argument about a bridge.”

Tools are just tools. They’re used to build machines. Machines comprise civilization.

And civilization is art.

Don’t narrow the palette choices, just get better at blending the colors.

The idea of never interfering just sounds a little too strict, like there’s motivated reasoning afoot. I can’t help but assume the worst: people looking for excuses to enjoy their luck unperturbed by the suffering of others.

When I was studying music composition in Bern, we learned of an early 18th-century composer who claimed that everything of consequence that could possibly be said in the key of C Major had already been said.

We all laughed because it was so dogmatic and represented the kind of thinking we all hated. He was of course proven wrong by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and thousands of others, including yours truly.

Economies? Governments? We’re still composing new ones. Doubters may be surprised by what new melodies we come up with, even with well-worn scales.

Today we already see countless examples of mixed economies surviving and thriving with public guarantees.

Is it the best for GDP or the most efficient? Maybe not. But so what? Quality-of-life scores matter more to me.

And some things are deontological. Meaning sometimes we take the less efficient path because of aesthetics. Principles.

It’s why the Talmud makes clear that we don’t shove the person on the train tracks in the trolley problem.

Try explaining that to a dogmatic utilitarian. They’ll keep saying, “no, you’re wrong, you don’t know the facts, five people will die if you don’t.”

But it’s HIM who doesn’t get it.

He doesn’t get that it’s not math class.

It’s art class.

What matters to me boils down to inscrutable aesthetic issues. As such, I often dream of a machine that can clear out all the weeds of information and logic so that we can finally get to the good stuff behind all that: values.

Facts don’t care about my feelings? Okay. Here’s a fact: In fMRI data, conservatives have a slightly bigger half of the amygdala than liberals. It’s the brain part that links to threat and fear processing.

Studies show a consistent, statistically non-trivial correlation. That’s a fact.

How you feel about that is up to you.

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