

Every once in a while someone makes the bold "contrarian" case that cheap mass-produced beer is better than hoppy microbrews and then names a particular favorite. Most recently Madeleine Davies did it for Miller High Life but I've seen it argued with Budweiser and (my personal favorite) Miller Lite as the beer of choice. As someone who loves both a good Slatepitch and a mass-produced American beer, I sort of agree with and appreciate these columns. But there is a huge problem.

Liking popular beer isn't contrarian

The best-selling beer in America is Bud Light, followed by Coors Light, followed by Budweiser, Miller Lite, Corona Extra, Natural Light, Busch Light, Michelob Utra, Busch, and Heineken.

And even that gets a little misleading because there's fractal inequality among beers. Bud Light outsells Heineken by a factor of ten. It's almost three times as popular as Coors Light.

Now there's nothing wrong with this. Bud Light isn't my absolute favorite, but it's perfectly good. And like all mass-market domestic American light beers, I tend to prefer it to "fancier" microbrews in most situations. But so does everyone else. This isn't a contrarian stand at all. It's like saying pizza and tacos are tasty. Or it's fun to veg out on the couch and watch TV sometimes. Everyone knows these things to be true.

#Content

Just one link for you today because it is long. The automation myth.

Housing is about institution, not ideology

Gabriel Metcalf had a pretty good CityLab piece about how anti-development policies contribute to San Francisco's affordable housing crisis. In the interests of trolling, he cast this as "progressives" being to blame for the problem. That prompted a response from Robert Cruickshank that was mostly in the vein of a "no true Scotsman" argument over whether we can really call the various city officials of San Francisco over the past 40 years progressive.

The real truth, though, is that this is mostly about institutions not ideology.

Here's how you can tell. Go to any of the high-cost, supply-constrained metro areas of America. If you go to a poor community in such a metro area and find someone who is anti-development, that person will tell you they are worried development will reduce housing affordability. But if you go to a rich community in such a metro are and find someone who is anti-development, that person will tell you they are worried development will reduce home values. There's obviously a conceptual tension here. But the really remarkable thing is how it plays out politically.

A time for choosing

You might think the "put the housing in the rich areas" faction would fight it out in the city council with the "put the housing in the poor areas" faction and in some cities one would win and in other cities the other would win. But it doesn't happen. Instead every city decides to curtail development everywhere even though the net outcome of this -- housing scarcity, a narrow tax base, inadequate public services and job growth -- isn't really making anyone happy.

What you have, in other words, is a dysfunctional method for making decisions. As David Schleicher likes to point out this stems in part from the fact that you don't really have party politics in American cities. The different members of the city council don't form ideologically oriented teams that put forward competing coherent citywide programs and try to beat each other. Instead, each councilmember seeks reelection on a local basis and all the incumbents tend to cooperate with each other in letting everyone be the mini-boss of their own district.

The upshot of this is neither a progressive nor a conservative outcome, but an excess of localism and negativity. Decisions are made on the basis of things like do some people on the block think the proposed building looks bad rather than "is it good or bad for the city to have more or fewer buildings."

The fix we need is one in which city governments are made to choose between one of several coherent citywide pathways for growth or lack thereof. Some cities at some times will, of course, choose no growth or slow growth. But some will sometimes pick growth! Right now, though, what everyone picks is "growth but not anything that ever annoys even one of my constituents." Which in practice means no growth.

Song of the day

An actual contrarian opinion. The Sixpence None The Richer cover of "There She Goes" is way better than the original.