Astral Codex Ten

Robert Moses

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Robert Moses

Article

Robert Moses is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between January 29, 2021 and December 07, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “the failures of top-down planning: … Robert Moses”; “a Robert-Moses-like plan to spend $114 billion over several decades”; “Robert Moses”. It most often appears alongside Congress, Jane Jacobs, Scott.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: January 29, 2021
  • Last seen: December 07, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Contra Weyl On Technocracy
January 29, 2021 · Original source
I like Seeing Like A State as much as anyone else (though see the caveats in Part VII of my review for some criticisms). But it worries me that everyone analyzes the exact same three examples of the failures of top-down planning: Soviet collective farms, Brasilia, and Robert Moses. I’d like to propose some other case studies:
Inline links: my review
But if you accept that "technocracy" describes things other than Soviet farming, Brasilia, and Robert Moses, the trick stops working. You notice a lot of things you could describe using the same vocabulary were good decisions that went well. Then you have to ask yourself: is Seeing Like A State the definitive proof that technocratic schemes never work? Or is it a compendium of rare man-bites-dog style cases, interesting precisely because of how unusual they are?
Did you notice none of Weyl's examples of technocracy fit this definition at all? Robert Moses had zero formal training in urban planning or anything related to city-building. The Soviet leadership wasn't "meritocratically chosen". And Oscar Niemeyer didn't construct a High Modernist planned village and a control village, test which one performed better on various metrics, and scale the winner up into Brasilia.
Ezra Klein On Vetocracy
February 20, 2021 · Original source
Second, why is this happening? Any explanation that focuses too much on national politics must be wrong; it's happening equally at the local and corporate level. Klein traces the issue back to a well-intentioned reaction against eg Robert Moses, the High Modernists, and their tendency to devise grand projects, refuse to consult anyone affected, and bulldoze over anything that stood in their way (especially underprivileged people). Eventually citizens got tired enough of this that they implemented some veto points. Overall there seems to be a story where people were doing something bad, concerned citizens came up with a solution - add more veto points, so somebody has a chance to stop bad things before they happen! - and this became a one-way ratchet where veto points often increase but never decrease. Environmental impact reports, civil liberties groups suing the government over new laws, labor unions forcing terms on companies - all of these are examples of good people trying to prevent bad things in ways that introduce more veto points.
Inline links: High Modernists, refuse to consult anyone affected
The Consequences Of Radical Reform
March 09, 2021 · Original source
The thread that runs from Edmund Burke to James Scott and Seeing Like A State goes: systems that evolve organically are well-adapted to their purpose. Cultures, ancient traditions, and long-lasting institutions contain irreplaceable wisdom. If some reformer or technocrat who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room sweeps them aside and replaces them with some clever theory he just came up with, he'll make everything much worse. That's why collective farming, Brasilia, and Robert Moses worked worse than ordinary people doing ordinary things.
Inline links: Seeing Like A State
Book Review: Antifragile
March 23, 2021 · Original source
Some sections seemed straight out of Scott. There's the mandatory section on Le Corbusier, Robert Moses, and Jane Jacobs. Taleb's picture of the fragilista prediction-loving intellectual-yet-idiot with his formal system and no willingness to think outside of it matches Scott's complaints about High Modernism. Taleb's ode to tinkering and skin-in-the-game matches Scott's conception of metis. Taleb is much more ambitious (some would say less careful and scholarly) than Scott, so instead of focusing on a few studies of historical farmers, he relates this to almost every part of today's society. But it's the same argument.
Your Book Review: Public Citizens
June 23, 2023 · Original source
But by the 1960s, the cracks in this model were starting to show. A report prepared for President-elect Kennedy outlined the problem of regulatory capture, the process by which agencies intended to regulate private businesses got too close to their subjects and end up serving them instead4. And a new class of liberal intellectuals rose to prominence by pointing out the ways in which the political establishment’s plans sometimes rode roughshod over the citizens they were supposed to serve. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring criticized the USDA’s indiscriminate use of pesticides, and Jane Jacobs’ grassroots movement successfully blocked Robert Moses—the ultimate agency man—from ramming a highway through the West Village.
Inline links: 4
What Ever Happened To Neoreaction?
December 07, 2023 · Original source
YIMBYism: An obvious extension of the above. The past was able to build things, and provided its citizens with cheap housing and beautiful cities. The present doesn’t. Why not? It’s easy and not entirely wrong to blame liberal democracy for this - if you ask the current citizens of a city to vote on new construction, they’ll usually say no, and the grandest construction was implemented by authoritarian central planners like Robert Moses who ignored them. Neoreaction ably leveraged this into an argument for general authoritarianism - and if it was that or endless NIMBYism, the authoritarianism started seeming attractive.