Thanks so much for this thorough and thoughtful post and your incredible donation. I know it’s a few years out of date now but anyone with an ongoing interest in the YIMBY issue is likely to find this post as a sensible Schelling point for discussion.
I imagine more EAs should be considering this as a cause. I cannot couch the strength of my belief in this into forum-appropriate language. I note that there are many plausible avenues to change—not just political, but activism too. People are not persuaded by robust economic arguments quite as much as evocative art that touches the right parts of the psyche. It feels like YIMBYism has a slim chance of shoeing-in to existing sentiments around poverty, which I believe find their way mostly expressed as useless left-flavored activism of its various stripes. There is big appetite for change but people may not see that unless it becomes glaringly obvious what the issue is.
To this end I consider things like creating a British sitcom based around some farcical arrangement of characters that is able to both neutralise the false-positive targets of socialist do-gooder sentiment, while bootstrapping somehow the economics of YIMBY into grokkability. I am aware these words don’t quite parse together, but I believe there must at least be better attractor states of poltical consensus in the country than the current ones. I don’t have anything productive to comment but eagerly solicit DMs from anyone vaguely interested in the arts, performing, improv. I also solicit comments from anyone with leads on esoteric comedy that manages to make nuanced political points.
Thanks so much for this thorough and thoughtful post and your incredible donation. I know it’s a few years out of date now but anyone with an ongoing interest in the YIMBY issue is likely to find this post as a sensible Schelling point for discussion.
I imagine more EAs should be considering this as a cause. I cannot couch the strength of my belief in this into forum-appropriate language. I note that there are many plausible avenues to change—not just political, but activism too. People are not persuaded by robust economic arguments quite as much as evocative art that touches the right parts of the psyche. It feels like YIMBYism has a slim chance of shoeing-in to existing sentiments around poverty, which I believe find their way mostly expressed as useless left-flavored activism of its various stripes. There is big appetite for change but people may not see that unless it becomes glaringly obvious what the issue is.
To this end I consider things like creating a British sitcom based around some farcical arrangement of characters that is able to both neutralise the false-positive targets of socialist do-gooder sentiment, while bootstrapping somehow the economics of YIMBY into grokkability. I am aware these words don’t quite parse together, but I believe there must at least be better attractor states of poltical consensus in the country than the current ones. I don’t have anything productive to comment but eagerly solicit DMs from anyone vaguely interested in the arts, performing, improv. I also solicit comments from anyone with leads on esoteric comedy that manages to make nuanced political points.