Does Abundance Start at Home?

I am fundamentally more interested in policies that let people do things than in policies that let the government do things.

"What should the government do? Well, it's things that people can't do on their own or that markets can't do on their own." Basic research funding, industrial policy, infrastructure, things like that.

I think part of the reason people don't trust big institutions is because they believe in themselves, and they want to do things themselves. Things like starting a micro daycare, or starting your own indie media project, or being an active participant and shaper of the world around you—being a person who is part of that, rather than just being delivered goods to consume by the government. The absence of this culture is part of why we have an institutional crisis.

There's this underlying idea that voice is veto—that the default way that people make their voices heard in politics these days is by stopping things or banning things or blocking things or slowing things down. This is absolutely accurate—that is structurally the way that it works in a lot of places

"Okay, so limit voice. It's just stopping things." But then there's a deeper question to me, which is why is veto our default mode of civic engagement?

This means instead of just relying on the people who show up to that community planning meeting, you actually go out into the community and talk to people who are busy or don't know that the planning meeting is happening, but then you timebox it. Once the comment period is done, it's done, and you move forward.

After the 60-day [comment] period was over and everyone's concerns were addressed, policy would move very quickly because all the consensus had been built during the comment period.

She said that "Well, what we did was we sent text messages to 200,000 constituents asking for their opinion on this one thing, and they literally just texted back their response. Now we use LLMs to organize people's thoughts." That's not that high-effort. There are ways of soliciting citizen input that are just less high effort than hosting a town hall meeting at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday.

when I was a kid, there was an empty lot in the middle of a cul-de-sac, and the neighborhood dads all got together and built a treehouse. This is just very concrete, right? As a kid, it's inspiring to see your parents do that. It builds an ethos that the way you improve the world is by going out and improving the world.

The main problem with all these vetocracy processes is that they take everybody's time and don't build things. I can't go to a meeting with my mockup of how I want my neighborhood park to look and say, "We're in for $5,000 and we have ten other neighbors in for $5,000. Let's build this." There is no process for that.

How did we get to the point historically where the thing that a lot of public interest groups do, rather than building things, is complaining?

I also agree that probably everyone has some issue that they are willing to spend a lot of time on because they care so much about that. For everything else, they're kind of like, "I don't have time to think about it."

How do we redirect that energy away from vetocracy into something that is more constructive or collaborative?

If you do something for your community, can you file a reimbursement grant?

Empower people to have things they want to have, but not to kill things they want to kill.

Rather than even petitioning the government websites to suck less, they just built online interfaces that were better for the exact same government services. If you swap .gov for .g0v in the URL, citizens would automatically go to the better website. Once the Taiwanese government saw this happening, they decided to collaborate and support integrations.

But I think there are other instances in which people turn towards vetoing because they feel disempowered in general, and the only thing they know how to do is to veto. If they were able to receive a small grant or do something else in their community that felt productive and supported, then people wouldn't spend so much energy trying to veto stuff.

The “You can just do things” energy does need to be accompanied by moral seriousness about what you're doing.

You should be really sure of your math, and you should approach it, I think, with an attitude of humility, public service, a sense that your job is to do right by these people, and that if you're doing something they disagree with, you have a really good reason.

I think politicians should be actively putting out something like, "Hey, here's what we did this week."