Unfortunately, I think this drags us back into the ever-tedious debate about preferences... but in a kind of hilarious manner!
After all, the usual suburbanist retort is that "people want suburbs", right?
Under the bathroom analogy, this is like the person who's waiting in line just assuming that if there's a 40-60 split of stalls to urinals, then 40% of people must actually be needing to use a stall at any given time.
Which is INSANE if the true proportion is actually only 10%!
But it also kind of makes sense. Stalls have more privacy. They're isolated from each other. No one wants to sit there policing what everyone at the stadium is doing in that stall, they just want the line to move faster, amirite? There's an information/values-communication problem here, where we imagine we don't have any preference information from "overhoused" suburbanites, mostly because we file away most of their complaints about homeownership into the bin of "well, that's just what it means to own a house, you lazy dolt!" -- but also, because we aren't asking them the right questions.
After all, in the same way that no one asks people in a stall whether they're going 1 or 2, no one goes around asking overhoused suburbanites whether they'd have preferred a smaller place, a smaller yard, a corner bodega, or any of the other pros/cons of urbanism.
I actually thought the analogy was going to be about bike lanes and car lanes! I've learned to never, ever make the "gets the bikes out of the car lanes" analogy. People want respect for their needs, not efficiency. In this case, as a pooper, people want politicians to see and hear their needs, not just make short lines to the bathroom.
Urinals and stalls are substitute goods, analogous to detached dwellings and apartments are substitute goods. And they each set is perfectly rival in consumption, at the point of use, if not the point of sale. It is not possible to use a urinal and stall at the same time, just as nobody can occupy two houses at the same time (but someone could own both house, and prevent people from using them, even without occupying them).
As a woman who’s had to wait in endless lines because there are more stalls+urinals in men’s bathrooms than stalls in women’s bathrooms in most places, you lost me immediately.
Unfortunately, I think this drags us back into the ever-tedious debate about preferences... but in a kind of hilarious manner!
After all, the usual suburbanist retort is that "people want suburbs", right?
Under the bathroom analogy, this is like the person who's waiting in line just assuming that if there's a 40-60 split of stalls to urinals, then 40% of people must actually be needing to use a stall at any given time.
Which is INSANE if the true proportion is actually only 10%!
But it also kind of makes sense. Stalls have more privacy. They're isolated from each other. No one wants to sit there policing what everyone at the stadium is doing in that stall, they just want the line to move faster, amirite? There's an information/values-communication problem here, where we imagine we don't have any preference information from "overhoused" suburbanites, mostly because we file away most of their complaints about homeownership into the bin of "well, that's just what it means to own a house, you lazy dolt!" -- but also, because we aren't asking them the right questions.
After all, in the same way that no one asks people in a stall whether they're going 1 or 2, no one goes around asking overhoused suburbanites whether they'd have preferred a smaller place, a smaller yard, a corner bodega, or any of the other pros/cons of urbanism.
I actually thought the analogy was going to be about bike lanes and car lanes! I've learned to never, ever make the "gets the bikes out of the car lanes" analogy. People want respect for their needs, not efficiency. In this case, as a pooper, people want politicians to see and hear their needs, not just make short lines to the bathroom.
I don't think there is a more efficient way to bring out more BS from a group of people than to ask them what they need.
Was this the affordable oranges twitter thread you were thinking of?
https://x.com/JeremiahDJohns/status/1401349626385534977
Urinals and stalls are substitute goods, analogous to detached dwellings and apartments are substitute goods. And they each set is perfectly rival in consumption, at the point of use, if not the point of sale. It is not possible to use a urinal and stall at the same time, just as nobody can occupy two houses at the same time (but someone could own both house, and prevent people from using them, even without occupying them).
As a woman who’s had to wait in endless lines because there are more stalls+urinals in men’s bathrooms than stalls in women’s bathrooms in most places, you lost me immediately.
Yes, I thought of this, but I figured it was better to write what I knew about firsthand!