Smashing the NIMBYs created modern capitalism

rho138

Their non-linear storytelling is hard to keep me engaged tbh.

zerobees

Somewhat tangentially, I think the term "NIMBY" is actually one of the most significant impediments to getting rid of NIMBYism. It reduces the debate to fighting some imagined, small class of property owners who oppose progress. In reality, everyone is a NIMBY when someone shows up and tries to build a rail line or some high-density housing in your backyard. Sure, you support progress as a concept , but this is not the right place - have we considered alternate locations? Can the infrastructure cope with that? Don't we need to build another hospital or a police station first? What about the impacts on the Canada thistle and raccoon habitat? I'm only half-joking here. I have plenty of notionally anti-NIMBY friends and they, without fail, are collecting petitions and protesting at planning meetings every time someone tries to ruin their backyard tranquility. And I'm sure I'd be doing that too if they tried to put a Costco or a highway off-ramp over there. Fundamentally, the proposition behind a lot of progress-centric projects is that they will harm some people for the well-being of others, and this is something we stubbornly fail to address. If we're OK with that as a society, we should say so, and we should have streamlined ways to lessen these impacts instead of pretending they don't exist, and it's all just irrationality of the select few. Make it a part of the social contract, instead of the current implicit promise that your cul-de-sac can stay the same forever. And once we have that, just build stuff - without years of reviews, environmental studies, lawsuits, and so forth.

0gs

... does this article presume that lots of people want MORE capitalism?

lithocarpus

Didn't read the article, but regarding the title, this is kind of fundamental. NIMBYs want to protect some aspects of a particular place usually because it is their home. Capitalism largely lives on destroying particular places to benefit people who are [mostly] somewhere else. This is the only thing happening in capitalism but it's a big part of it. The end game of this kind of capitalism is that every place is destroyed (ecologically) and it gradually grinds to a painful halt. Maybe there's a way to have some elements of capitalism in a society that doesn't destroy places but I don't know.