We perhaps shifted from placing emphasis on our collective effectiveness in advancing prosperity and opportunity for people to the perceived fairness that was embodied in whichever particular steps we happened to take. We shifted our focus from sins of omission to sins of commission. Take California: there is almost endless attention paid to making sure that no single state project has even a tint of impropriety or suboptimality. The result of that cultural shift, is that the state as a whole is then often beset with awful results. With this ethos and panoply of strictures, it turns out that California is almost functionally incapable of constructing a high speed rail line connecting its 2 major metro regions. California has less civilizational capacity than the France of the 70s that built the TGV! California shifted mid century from being the US’s fastest-growing state — 50% population growth between 1950 and 1960 — to a state that is somehow, improbably, shrinking. This is, obviously, mostly because of the regulations the state’s inhabitants put in place that block the housing that’s required to support California’s economic success. As a result, California has lost the “technology” of being able to affordably house its inhabitants.

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