An issue I have with this essay is that it assumes that it's the absence of central planning which gives rise to unlivable and automobile dominated cities.<p>But if you look at old photos of European or American cities before the rise of the internal combustion engine, you typically see a completely unplanned street usage: bicycles, pedestrians, horse drawn vehicles, kids running amok, etc. all sharing the space in seeming anarchy.<p>It required massive central planning to replace this shared space with segregated streets with 90% of the space dedicated solely to motorised traffic. Entire neighbourhoods were razed to allow central planners to run huge new traffic arteries through the centers of cities. Land was "opened up" for suburban development through central planning and massive centrally planned road and motorway building.<p>I guess my point is that associating "central planning" with liveable patterns of development does not seem reasonable to me. Central planning can and has been used for good and for bad - it was used to destroy urban environments in favour of motorised vehicles in some places, just as it's been used to promote much more liveable development patterns in places like the Netherlands.
As Dutch born but moved to US 10 years ago, this article sums up everything I don't like about The Netherlands. He speaks about all the positive notes but there are plenty of downsides to it as well.<p>The biggest one is that if you don't fit the Dutch mold, it feels like having an overbearing parent at your back at all times. If you do fit the Dutch mold, it is the greatest country to live in.<p>Some more negative aspects. There are limits to parking spots per home. There are neighborhoods were you can only have a single car per family. There are no more parking spots. Expecting visitors? Sorry.<p>The Dutch government prefers people to take public transportation which generally is excellent but they make owning a car expensive and complicated (like parking example above).<p>You need building licenses for almost any change to your home - outside or inside. You want to create an extra bathroom?Apply for a license. Want to remove a tree from your yard? Well good luck with that.<p>The Netherlands is one of the most beautifully urban-designed places in the world for sure but it comes at a price. Some people love it and some people do not.
This post off-base in all dimensions. The Heritage Foundation economic freedom index ranks the Netherlands ahead of the the United States.<p>Zoning and regional transportation planning are not the central planning to which Hayek is talking about. And one only has to look at the farmer protests of 2019-2020 to see the popular response when the government overreaches.<p>Additionally all of the dunks on the US are misguided. The Netherlands is a country of 18 million people, in one of the flattest countries in existence with >90% of the population in urban areas. “We love bikes.” Well, duh.
"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." -- Friedrich Hayek<p>But who wants to listen to that, right?
> Americans could never do this, he said. We would not trust the builder to make a building so watertight. We would not trust the window manufacturer. We would not trust the water authority to keep the water level perfectly constant. Our insurers would not insure this. Our families would not buy it. Our regulators would not permit it. Our builders would not attempt it.<p>As a Dutch person, it would be easy to feel a bit flattered and proud. But instead I'm gonna have to take the modest pill and call bullshit. Building is sort of my hobby, I've stripped (to the studs if it were American ;)) down and rebuilt my house in the past 4 years, and while doing so have watched endless youtube videos of builders, many american.<p>From my perspective there's only one thing in that paragraph that's correct, and that's that in the US you wouldn't trust the water authority to keep the water level. That's not even an American thing per se (although the US is infamous for aspiring to be independent from government), but mostly a Dutch thing. My house is 5 meter below sea level, a window being 6" above the water line is just not a big deal when you've got that in mind. It's not just I'm at risk of a moldy basement. If the government fucks up, <i>everything</i> would be under meters of water.<p>The U.S.'s has excellent building quality and whenever something is not up to snuff locally you just import from Germany. The U.S. is also not as homogenous as the tiny Netherlands are, you could have a cardboard sheathed house in Texas, or you could have a thick walled brownstone house in Chicago.<p>Also we don't have as many talented tradespeople. Our education system is geared towards getting people to work desk jobs, I think the U.S. system spreads the talent a little bit more evenly. In the past 30 years or so, we've mostly been building cookie cutter houses, the only thing you could say is we've been working on fancier cookie cutters.
The author seems to make some grand philosophical point. Instead here is my take :<p>a handy list of things we know markets can't solve in societies best interest ( 1: at some specific scale , 2: given a certain moral framework )<p>-Violence (police , jails)<p>-Firemen<p>-Healthcare(/insurance)<p>-Currency<p>-Transport / Infrastructure<p>-schooling<p>And probably a couple more I missed.
The author touches upon the housing crisis, and it's connection to mechanisms for urban planning.<p>To me it's a moot point: it doesn't matter if there's central planning or rule-based federal coordination or whatever. if you have toxic (foreign) capital using housing as investment objects, that'll drive up the price for everyone and create an affordability crisis.
I can't comment on the Dutch aspect, but for anyone interested in Hayek, the Mises Institute has many of his works available for free: <a href="https://mises.org/search-mises/field_author_1/1122?search=Hayek" rel="nofollow">https://mises.org/search-mises/field_author_1/1122?search=Ha...</a>
Not Just Bikes talks about zoning in the US vs Dutch cities in this video: <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ</a>. My impression was that the US has more restrictive regulations on what can be built.
An interesting parallel: the early days of the Internet assumed universal competence in a way like this piece describes. Postel's law says "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." Relying on competence didn't last long though.<p>The internet has essentially no regulation. It's firewalls that protect against those who are "liberal" in what they send and voracious in what they accept.<p>There's some planning, but it's not centralized except in the large-scale walled gardens like mobile service providers and the big cloud providers.
"Several caveats are in order. Hayek did not predict that planning a single aspect of the national economy would lead to totalitarianism. He even offers ‘modern towns’ as an area where some planning is necessary"<p>Sort of renders the whole article unnecessary to me.
The author immediately contrasts the US, which itself is planned. Pretty silly if you ask me. I don't think there's a nation in the world that actually applies the liberal capitalist mode as Hayek wishes it to be applied. I would say because of the perception that America is the laissez-faire model, the culture of the US allows it to be further perverted while still maintaining the sheen of its laurels as a liberal state.