Today’s post is more conceptual than usual; I’m writing about a phenomenon I’ve noticed over the years. You (or I, anyway) tend to see this from conservatives—basically the tendency to conflate policymaking with social engineering, and to treat the idea of public policy with a certain suspicion. The result is that problems that might be solvable are instead treated as moral dilemmas or opportunities to build character.

I wrote about something similar here, with reference to the idea that homeownership is morally superior to renting, for example. I don’t think talk of virtue or morality is out of place in policy discussions—one of my professors always said that all public policy debates come down to values—but I also think this kind of thing can serve as obfuscation or as a way of arguing for doing nothing without appearing to argue as such. I wrote on that here, with regard to the metaphysical, pondering tone that a lot of conservative commentators took with the pandemic. Or here, where I reviewed a book in which the author took such a tone in discussing how, as I read it, driving and walking should be dangerous because it means you have some skin in the game. “Skin in the game” is an abstraction; getting run over by a car is reality.

Policy is not cheating. Solving problems is not cheating. It isn’t plucking the heart out of the mystery. Metaphysical abstraction isn’t reality. Understand this doesn’t require you to be a materialist or a Marxist, or believing that everything boils down to class and economics. Rather, it’s merely recognizing that everything doesn’t boil down to values and morals and metaphysics and faith.

I think of how people say America’s housing crisis is about big city values or childlessness, or how the issue of homelessness couldn’t possibly have anything to do with housing. (Or, in a totally different realm, how terrorism couldn’t possibly have anything to with blowback to America’s foreign policy.)

Some people see these problems as disembodied platonic forms or as vague manifestations of original sin or the human condition, not as actual problems with actual causes that can be identified and remediated. They sometimes seem to think it’s more important to teach a lesson than to solve a problem. For such people nothing is really a policy failure, because there isn’t really any such thing as policy.

If you’re involved in some political or social issue (if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you have some involvement in urbanism, zoning, or pro-housing reform), have you noticed this? What does the left version of this tendency look, as opposed to the right version I’m more familiar with? I’m curious to hear your thoughts!

Related Reading:

The Housing Crisis is a Policy Problem

Block That Train

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