What ideological labels would you use to describe your politics?

[traininthedistance]

Pointy-headed nattering nabob elitist hipster misandrist treehugger East Coast socialistic LIE-brul.

[traininthedistance]

General distaste for all intellectual projects to recreate society.

What counts as an "intellectual project to recreate society"? Is it better to perpetuate the mistakes of the past, and leave things broken, because to do otherwise would be to "recreate society"?  Even if doing so in actuality pledges your fealty to a previous such intellectual project?  Even if inaction has victims– real living, breathing victims– of its own?

More generally, does everything always get worse over time?  Is there any space in your worldview to try and make the world a better place (in full knowledge that success is never guaranteed), or is it all just funhouse anti-Whiggishness all the way down?

[traininthedistance]

Most movements don't actually consider the human costs of disruption of norms on actual living, breathing people, for whom such disruptions are not statistical aberrations but real crises with real consequences. Inaction is always easy to measure and quantify, action is trickier to justify or examine because those policies have not yet actually been instituted.

There's the kernel of a good cautionary tale in the first sentence here, but the rest goes deeply off the rails super fast.  Like, seriously, the idea that people are good at measuring and quantifying the costs of inaction just flies so directly in the face of every piece of evidence we have.  I mean, yes, of course "action for action's sake" is not something we should do.  But I'm quite confident that's not the problem we have right now, and behaving as if it is overcorrects us into absurdity.

To take one example, it is easy to call for "saner" environmental policies,

Ooh, good example.

but to what degree can we be sure that the (real) harm caused to future generations by climate changes outweighs the (equally real and immediate) harm to those whose livelihoods are dependent on producing coal, oil, and natural gas,

Okay, what about the real and immediate harm our current system has on people who get asthma and cancer from particulate pollution, or lose their water supply due to fracking, or are already getting hit with desertification, aquifer loss, more and stronger floods, etc? This isn't just some future-generation thing, even by your ludicrous standards there ought to be justification for some action seeing as there are victims already.  Unless of course victims of the status quo don't count as real victims in your mind.

or to the massive costs needed to renovate the power grid,

You think infrastructure lasts forever?  We'd need to renovate that sh*t sooner or later anyway, you don't get to count that as an extra cost.  And, anyway, there are a lot of investments that would pay for themselves over a pretty quick timeframe anyway, but for whatever reason (inertia, lack of upfront capital, bureaucratic obstacles) don't get built.  I mean, do you seriously think that there are no such worthy investments to be made? Not even just w/r/t the power grid, but in general?

or to the extra expense of transportation to those struggling to get by as is?

Oh, god, really? This disingenuous rot? Protip: those people who are actually most struggling to get by wouldn't see their transportation costs rise under a sane enviro policy.  To make that claim requires both a stunning ignorance of a) the reality for millions of people, and b) the actual sorts of solutions that are being offered on this point.

Also, BTW, our transportation system as currently designed is quite literally a grisly horror show. People getting maimed and killed trying to cross the street is a real crisis with real consequences.  But that's just the way it is, so those victims don't count, amirite?

(One of these days I need to start a thread about the invention of jaywalking, BTW– which is an underrated and forgotten case of societal change being harmfully thrust on people in exactly the way you bemoan.  Let's be perfectly clear– some changes are bad, and I'm happy to decry them when they should be decried. But I guess in your mind, it's been made, we shouldn't fix it, too late no backsies?)

We cannot quantify the harm of inaction over the next century, so how do we know the consequences of global climate change then outweigh the costs of action now?

[citation needed]

If you want to say that we cannot pinpoint things to the dollar and cent, sure.  But we can– and do– have enough evidence to make a reasonable, and overwhelmingly compelling, guess.  The plausible range might be wide but even on the lowest end of impacts/costs there are a lot of things we'd need to do. (And, of course, wouldn't a healthy risk-averse conservativism behave as if to prepare for the worst-case scenario?)  I mean, I guess you can be a radical skeptic if you so wish, but at a certain point I have to wonder how you square that with the existence of industrial and post-industrial technology in the world today.

Either that, or you're engaging in the most sharply sloping time discounting I've ever seen, basically to the point where future generations hold no moral weight in your calculus.  But, of course, there are people alive today who are those future generations.  Apres moi, le deluge?

This bias of action or just doing something to look like you're doing something over the alternative solution of actually weighing whether the consequences of inaction outweigh the consequences of action is very distasteful.

Again, no such bias actually exists!  You've given me exactly zero indication that you take the "consequences of inaction" seriously– or that people in general take it seriously.

Of course the well-being of people can be improved by the efforts of other people. I'm distrustful of any attempts to do that on a systematic level. You improve people's lives by covering for your coworker when she goes to take her kids to the doctor or by volunteering at your local food bank. That doesn't make the world a better place, though. The world is neither good nor bad, the world simply is. You can make other people's lives more pleasant and your own more pleasant by extension, though.

Again, what counts as "systematic"?  Was the New Deal too "systematic" for you?  What about the introduction of an income tax?  Or the Voting Rights Act?  Fighting Jim Crow was a pretty systematic societal change, now wasn't it.  Freeing the slaves, now that was a shake-up, pity the poor plantation owners being disrupted.  Are you saying that anything worth doing, is worth doing solely through small-scale private charity?  Are we floating in a sort of timeless jelly where past actions have no impact on the present, where present actions have no impact on the future?

Look, I'm not saying that you should have to view the world as "good or bad".  I'm certainly not saying that human civilization has an inherent teleology, that "the arc of history bends toward justice" (Though I will admit that MLK's quote, while not necessarily accurate, is useful for those of us who give a sh*t about trying to keep it from bending toward injustice.)  I'm not saying you have to believe anything.  

I am merely saying that you should acknowledge that the observable universe seems to obey predictable laws.  And that we can draw inferences from those laws, and act accordingly. In short, as Gully said that there is such a thing as evidence, and sometimes the evidence really does say, loud and clear, that action is necessary.

[traininthedistance]

One more thing I'll add, Mikado, is that a certain amount of change/disruption is inevitable even in the absence of concerted political pushes in that direction.  At the very least you always have to actively push against entropy.  In many cases, preventing the sort of disruption you are semi-rightfully scared of requires, itself, a systematic societal effort.  (Examples: basically anything having to do with zoning. The New Deal AAA totally overturning how ag markets work in an effort to keep farmers able to work their land.  Etc etc etc.)

In fact, one can very easily argue that the sorts of sane environmental policies that have you crying "disruption!" are themselves tailored to try and provide the least actual disruption for real people. Yes, even compared to the baseline of inaction. This ain't Jacobinism here.

[traininthedistance]

Yeah, I have no f**king clue what Mikado is talking about. The idea that modern public policy has a bias toward action is laughably false.

Given how much % of national GDP/GNP any government just to keep the apparatus of state going, this claim of yours looks very questionable.

How so? If anything, that confirms it.

Umm.. How so? The high rate of government expenditure is to keep a very active apparatus going in health, education, social services and all the things governments do. If they are perceived to be lacking in pro-activity then it might be that this definition of 'pro-activity' is very hard to meet.

Then there is the issue of whether any extra intervention will actually work

The question is not so much "high levels of government expenditure" vs. "low levels of government expenditure", it is "maintain the status quo" vs. "try a new approach".

Cutting military spending, for instance, is going to be perceived as action since it is a departure from current practice, even if doing so would lessen the "apparatus of state".

[traininthedistance]

Ok, in that case we are in a debate about the semantics of action, as military expenditure is certainly that as I would define it.

It is true that governments are conservative when it comes to spending plans and to public policy approaches but that in itself is not necessarily unreasonable (though many of the competing interests in trying to divert resources to their 'thing' might be).

Apparently. :/

Mikado was talking about "reshaping society", I was talking about "status quo bias"... redefining action to be all about percentage of government spending just muddies the waters.

What word would you use for my definition of "action" instead?

...

I would argue that the structural conservatism of governments with regards to spending and policy is inevitable more than anything. While there are indeed good reasons to not rashly jump into each and every new fad, trying to build an intellectual framework that specifically valorizes scleroticism for its own sake is unnecessary and counterproductive.

And, besides, there's a lot more to "change" than just budget negotiations– the shape of regulation, and mechanism by which politics and/or scholarship becomes policy, are important as well.  Take, for example, the history of the filibuster in the Senate, or FPTP vs. PR, or the competing moves towards making voting easier (in Oregon) or making it harder (in many other states).  Or perhaps I bore everyone with the nuts and bolts of parking policy– if I want to eliminate parking minimums from the zoning code (and, oh yes, I do want to do that) does that make me a wild-eyed activist, or am I shrinking government and therefore being a prudent conservative?

Let me put it this way: status quo government policy gave us this.  Does that strike you as reasonable?

[traininthedistance]

Also:

I'm sure Mikado would be more than happy to point out how slashing military spending would cause very real harm to employees of Lockheed Martin and their families.  I'm sure he'd be happy to point out that prison guards and cops need to eat, too.  Some towns, the jail's the only big employer around. They need our harsh drug laws to stay afloat, man.

Just something to think about.

[traininthedistance]

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No, of course not. But that policy was very much part of a plan to radically change society (one which has been successful for the most part).

Well, "successful".  And of course there is the difficulty, which is what I was trying to raise with my talk of fixing past mistakes, that any attempt to re-orient government policy towards something more humane and durable will now be read as "radical change" itself.  Even, apparently, more gradualist re-orientations.

And, of course, there's the question of where exactly the line is for "radical" change.  We can all agree that the French Revolution was radical.  We can, most of us at least, agree that sudden shocks and bloodshed are to be avoided whenever possible.  What I'm pushing back against, more than anything, is Mikado's apparent insinuation that commonsense reforms like a carbon tax or an urban growth boundary are beyond-the-pale speculative revolutions that ought to be thrown in that same bin.