Works In Progress is a beacon of light in what often feels to me like a hopeless intellectual and political scene. If only academia was even half as good.
The entire modern world, including capitalism and industrialisation, happened because we beat NIMBYism and vetocracy in 18th-century England.
Today, the vetocracy, the stakeholder state, the NIMBYs stop us building the nuclear power plants, railways, houses, towers, bridges, roads, gas turbines, solar panels, and powerlines that we need for growth.
Then, they stopped people from consolidating their land, transporting goods freely, investing in irrigation, and mortgaging their property to invest. The events that led to their downfall are called the Glorious Revolution. I think we can repeat what they did and have another Glorious Revolution of our own.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-abolishing-the-stakeholder-state-caused-the-industrial-revolution/
Early modern Europe was sclerotic, stifled by NIMBYs of its own: the aristocrats, guilds, and clergy who stood against the reforms that were necessary for 18th-century progress. Everyone knew that inheritance rules split land up too much, everyone knew that common land was overgrazed, everyone knew that property rights restricted making best use of land, labour, and capital.
Each one of them decided the answer was consolidating power in an absolute monarch. Each one of them failed completely. They didn't crush the NIMBYs: the NIMBYs crushed them.
One country launched itself into rapid growth, creating the industrial modernity we live under today: England. It did this, as everyone agreed was necessary, by overriding the tangle of landowner property rights that prevented best use of land. But it tried something almost unbelievable: to get the landowner NIMBYs to crush themselves.
England did not attempt to set up an absolutist state: quite the opposite. It gave landowners supreme power, and they used it to crush their fellows: the minority of landowners who were opposed to progress.
There are lessons for today. Many modern reformers think that the answer to NIMBYs is demonising them, trying to build an angry coalition of forces who hate homeowners or boomers or Republicans or environmentalists. But many of the most successful reform schemes operating around the world today try a different tack: bring a majority of homeowners onside, and it is much, much easier to crush the remaining NIMBYs.
We can still learn from England's Glorious Revolution.
Read my latest article, with historian Kara Dimitruk, in @WorksInProgMag.
