(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 428: The Case Against Localism

This week we’re joined by Trevor Latimer to talk about his book Small Isn’t Beautiful: The Case Against Localism. We chat about what localism is and how its geographically defined, as well as why “leave if you don’t like it” is disingenuous.

To listen to this episode, check it out at Streetsblog USA or our the hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

Jeff Wood (1m 53s):
Well, Trevor Latimer, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Trevor Latimer (1m 57s):
Hi, great to be here. This is gonna be awesome. I’m really excited to do it.

Jeff Wood (2m 1s):
Well thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Trevor Latimer (2m 5s):
Yeah, sure. I am from California originally. I keep this California flag behind me, but in my professional life, I started out my career as a political philosopher. I taught for four years at Dartmouth and at the University of Georgia. And then about four years ago I made a huge switch and I’m now a consultant for the federal government. I’ve worked with the Department of Veterans Affairs, cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency and primarily with fema.

Jeff Wood (2m 34s):
How does that like fold into your, or can you not talk about it?

Trevor Latimer (2m 37s):
I can talk about it. Sure. It, it wasn’t exactly a planned move. It was sort of more for family reasons, but it’s kind of been interesting because I, in the book, I’m a bit of a defender of the federal government and the power that it has and the ability it has to do great good in the world and it is, it is fun to see behind the curtain and sometimes see where the critics of the federal government get their ideas from. I’m not sure that even the critics know the nitty gritty. If they knew more about this, their criticisms would be even stronger. But, but I, it’s an opportunity to be on the other side of the academic wall or I, I remember we would say in graduate school or in in talks in academia, we’ll say that’s a practical problem as though it was like we’re throwing it over the door and it ends up in our camp now and I can see that these are real challenges.

Trevor Latimer (3m 31s):
And someone once told me like, you know, they gave us an explanation as to why the federal government isn’t so great at things and and the answer was like, if it was easier, someone else would’ve done it. The private sector would’ve done it.

Jeff Wood (3m 46s):
Yeah. Well, we’ll get into some of that when we talk about the book. The book is Small, isn’t Beautiful, the Case against Localism. When did you start thinking about localism? Was it something that you thought about as a kid even? Obviously not. No. Okay. Because I asked this question of of my guests because you know, a lot of ’em are planners, transportation people, et cetera, and and a lot of them, you know, when they’re a kid they go somewhere and they ride a train or it’s something that their parents did. But how did you get into locally? Like what was the thing that kind of brought you to the discussion?

Trevor Latimer (4m 11s):
I do actually have a, a story from my childhood that I wanna share, but it actually makes me a villain, which is fine. But I think it was when I was in eighth grade, the school district wanted to do some redistricting and I was gonna be moved from the catchment zone from the high school that people in my neighborhood had been going to. I could say for generations in California, that’s, that’s usually a lie. But they wanted us to move to a, a different high school that didn’t have the kind of same roots and didn’t have the same depth of network. It was a different, whole different group of people. And I kind of fought that with my parents and the PTA and the school board. And it was actually, I would say a formative experience for me in political science because I was what, 12 and I got up in front of the school board and gave my speech and that sort of thing.

Trevor Latimer (4m 59s):
So I was invoking some kind of localist arguments in that moment in my life. I didn’t think about it in terms of localism at the time and, and I quickly moved on to other things. But the impetus for this book was, well, even prior to the book I wrote my PhD dissertation about localism, but more in a historical context, the ways in which localism has been invoked in different periods of time and in different contexts and so on. The way I got into that topic was, I would say when I, when I was starting my academic studies, I was really interested in participatory democracy, which I’m sure you’ve had many people on the show who, who have, you know, listening to local people reinvigorating democracy at the local level and so on.

Trevor Latimer (5m 44s):
So I was, I was very much enamored with participatory democracy, but then started to see situations in which participatory democracy led to some really kind of bad outcomes. And I’m thinking, oh, maybe I really need to rethink the idea of participatory democracy at the local level. Cuz you will, you will notice when people talk about participatory democracy, they’ll say, oh, we don’t mean direct democracy, everyone voting and that sort of thing, initiative referendum in in California or the west in general. They’ll say like, oh, the way to reinvigorate democracy is to start local, right, because that’s where you can actually make a change that you can see in the world or or something like that. And so it was that kind of movement from particular democracy where I started to see the glimmers of skepticism towards localism.

Trevor Latimer (6m 31s):
And that’s kind of how it all got started. But the transition from the dissertation to the book was, there’s a more of a story in that too, which is the last chapter of the dissertation kind of went off the rails because it turned into a critique of a principle called subsidiary, which has a lot in common with localism. And so the end of this dissertation turned out to be a critique. And then since then I’ve kind of been more interested in the critical argument.

Jeff Wood (6m 57s):
How often do you get in arguments with people about localism?

Trevor Latimer (7m 1s):
Less and less often the people, the people who are willing to listen to me have either come to my side or we’ve agreed to disagree. But there are a lot of very strong critics of my position, especially in this book. I’ve had some very strong, almost visceral negative reactions to the book in addition to some very positive reactions.

Jeff Wood (7m 23s):
That’s really interesting. I’ll ask you that question again at the end when we go through it and and people can kind of noodle Yeah. On the ideas themselves. So I guess my first question is what is localism? I know that’s a hard question. You have a whole, wrote a whole book about it, but if you could distill it down for folks a little bit. Yeah,

Trevor Latimer (7m 37s):
I’m glad you asked that because that was the main, I would say analytical or intellectual challenge of the book is trying to come up with a definition of localism that fits a whole range of different impulses, localist impulses I would say. So I ended up coming up with the definition and involved a huge foray into critical geography and so on. But the definition is actually quite simple and I’m just gonna read it out. Localism is the belief or the claim that we should prioritize local by making decisions, exercising authority, or implementing policy locally or more locally. So it’s a prioritization of the local.

Jeff Wood (8m 15s):
So that phrase is like burned in my mind now because of the amount of times that’s repeated in the book. I think that’s a really interesting, you know, way to describe it and that also makes it kind of easier to argue for or against. But why is it so hard to nail down when people are using localism kind of as a constellation of arguments that they aren’t even quite sure what they’re talking about?

Trevor Latimer (8m 35s):
Yeah, and and the most common way that people encounter localism, I think in 2023 or the idea of localism is they’re constantly being told to buy local, eat local food. I’ve heard you say that we should buy local in terms of buying people’s books, which I recommend that you do in my case, but, and I’ll talk about why I’m willing to say that later. But yeah, local food, there’s arguments there which are about like greenhouse gases and minimizing the amount of transport that you need in order to bring food to market. Local food is better, but those are a bunch of different ways of thinking about localism. And then you have people who are like, local government should decide this or that, which is different, right?

Trevor Latimer (9m 17s):
The local food thing isn’t about local government at all. It’s about some claims about the way the food system should work, but the people who prioritize local governments probably aren’t even thinking in the same mode. And then let me just move over to another place where you often hear people say, well, we should make decisions at the local level because local communities are more natural than these large newfangled political arrangements that doesn’t fit with the story either. We could keep going. And it is just that a lot of people come to that claim from a lot of different directions. And to toot my own horn, it was, that was one of the accomplishments of the book is be able to say like, these people have very different impulses and reasons to come to this idea, but really they’re talking about the same thing once we distill what’s unique or what’s common to all these different perspectives.

Jeff Wood (10m 7s):
So you have tyranny, belonging, nature, democracy, knowledge, efficiency and those, you define those more as you get into each chapter, but each of those you kind of break down. You distill and you argue as to why those don’t make sense as arguments for localism. Was there one that was harder than others to break down and distill and, and maybe even argue against?

Trevor Latimer (10m 27s):
The hardest chapter to write were the despotism chapter or tier, any chapter it’s called now, but I don’t actually want to say that one. I think it’s going to be the belonging chapter is that we should do things at the local level because it’s at the local level where we have the kinds of relationships that are most important to us. We have a closer connection with our neighbors than we do with someone across the country or somewhere in Bangladesh or or or Germany or whatever the density or the thickness of our networks and interactions are at the local level. Therefore we should prioritize activity at the local level.

Trevor Latimer (11m 7s):
And that makes sense as an argument. But the reason why I have difficulty with it is understanding from a moral standpoint why it’s okay for us to prioritize people merely because they’re around us. Like I live in New York City, I didn’t come to New York City to develop bonds with my fellow New Yorkers. Many people move to New York City because they don’t like the bonds that they have developed in their local communities. So it’s, it’s a place of anonymity which people like, and that kind of extends to me as, as to why we’re allowed to favor these kinds of relationships, even if they’re spatial, that are morally arbitrary.

Trevor Latimer (11m 46s):
I would say some people will argue against that. And the reason why I found that chapter to be most difficult is that’s kind of a, a huge debate about intuitions, about moral life. I often actually, I have difficulty as a, as a moral philosopher understanding why it’s permissible for me to favor my family over others. Like I understand as a human being that that’s what we do in our society. But when you start to think really hard about it is why am I allowed to essentially be selfish towards my own people as opposed to those people when they have an equal claim on me?

Jeff Wood (12m 22s):
It reminds me of of Louis Worth and urbanism as a way of life, which is a PC he wrote back in 1938, which basically set the stage for the understanding, sociological understanding of cities. And actually we, we read it in full, the University of Chicago was kind enough to let us do that. We read it in full in episode 200. But basically what he says is that, you know, cities are places where people can disappear if they wish. They can specialize, they can get together with other groups and and advocate for things or they can be anonymous, right? And so I think you make that point a little bit in the book when you’re talking about people who want to get away from their neighborhoods, they want to get away from the localism because localism is not kind to them. People who, you know, maybe moved to the Castro district at a certain point in time in history and even maybe now moved away from their smaller towns in other places because it was a place where A, they could be anonymous but also B, there was a community that accepted them.

Jeff Wood (13m 14s):
And so it’s interesting to think about it in that perspective too, where Lewis is basically saying like, urbanism is something different that comes out of this glomeration of peoples, but it also changes the way humans act towards each other in a good way for a lot of people who didn’t want to have that local experience.

Trevor Latimer (13m 29s):
But then again, like this is a situation where we, we often conflate the ideas of community and locality. You mentioned community just a second ago, which we’re talking about gay people in, in, I would say throughout human history are feeling not at home in the places where they live. And so they came to cities and were able to refine community, but those communities weren’t really, really spatial in the same sense. Maybe the cash grow, but I’m thinking more of like Stonewall in here, in here in the city where it’s like community is not necessarily spatial, it’s about human interactions. So those two ideas just don’t necessarily line up.

Jeff Wood (14m 10s):
But it also goes to this question about, you know, what is the geography of local? Like what is the spacial aspect of of local and what does that mean? Is it, does local mean state? Does it mean you know, metropolitan region? Does it mean your neighborhood, does it mean your neighborhood association?

Trevor Latimer (14m 24s):
It’s relative philosophers or critical geographers will talk about space being relative. To put it more simply, it’s it’s that local is always local with respect to someplace else. So the neighborhood is local with respect to the city. The city is local with respect to the state. The state is local with respect to the national or federal government. And then with respect to the world. And then there’s an example I use in the book, it comes from hitchhiker’s guided the Galaxy because my mother was recently trying to read my book. She was saying it’s very slow going to me, but she, she really got the hitchhiker’s guided the Galaxy example, which is Arthur Dent is dealing with the local planning commission who won a knock down his house to build an expressway and he goes and lies in front of the tractor and is doing all that sort of thing.

Trevor Latimer (15m 15s):
And then he hears a voice from the heavens from I think they’re called the Bogans, which are a group of alien folk who are coming and they’re asking everyone on earth to prepare themselves for their planet to be obliterated. And Arthur Dent and, and the folks with him are like, why? How can you do this? And they say something like, the plans have been on file for you to object to on your local planning office in Alpha Sonari for months. You could have raised an objection then why didn’t you? And so the point of that story is that earth is local in the galaxy whereas the neighborhood or the planning commission for Arthur’s house are, are both local with respect to something else.

Trevor Latimer (15m 56s):
That’s the way I depicted in the book. But I recognize that that might be foreign to some people. A lot of people have a particular size in mind when they think of the local. I do however think that you and I might have a different sense of the local in mind based on our own frame of reference. So cities are local, right? But I live in New York City where like even Manhattan seems like it’s not local. The East Village is called East Village cuz it used to be a village. I also used to live in Los Angeles, which is a very distributed city as as you know and you don’t really think of yourself as, some people will say Los Angel, but they more identify more with their neighborhood than they do.

Trevor Latimer (16m 37s):
And in those cities are so large that localism there makes very little sense. But they’re also in a certain period of US history, 19th century where politicians would often refer to state governments as local governments. And so I think most people think local. They think either neighborhood or city or town or village. Does that fit with your sort of understanding?

Jeff Wood (17m 3s):
I guess so, but I think I might be more advanced in terms of what I think about why I’m saying this is because recently there’s been a lot of discussion about housing. It’s a big topic, it’s a topic that kind of permeates a lot of things. But especially in my world, housing and transportation is the main connection that we make to cities. And here in California, obviously I’m in San Francisco, you know, the state has been more proactive in taking, you know, kind of action against local communities and the local decision making that has been happening. And so when I think of local, I’m thinking of Palo Alto, you know, San Francisco itself, places like that. But also as it pertains to the state because the state is going to come crashing down on almost every city in the Bay area, right?

Jeff Wood (17m 48s):
Which includes two MSAs in federal parlance. And so I’m thinking about it from that perspective. I mean that’s my, my relationship to thinking that local isn’t good is the housing situation. Which is, you know, if we allow these little kind of fiefdoms to control the housing, then all of their problems get pushed to every other place in the area and even nationally. I mean you can see this from the discussions about, you know, people moving outta California and the state as a whole because it’s expensive from LA all the way to San Francisco to all the way to the northern, you know, the northern board of Oregon. And so that’s the way I, I look at it is from that housing perspective, Leona specific topic. But I think your book kind of illuminated why I feel that way about that and why I think that that’s an important thing to think about in that Russian nesting doll way that you described in the book.

Jeff Wood (18m 35s):
In that everything local is relative because there’s always a bigger fish.

Trevor Latimer (18m 39s):
That’s a really great way to put it. And I’m, and I’m glad you put it that way. And I’m also glad that you mentioned the actions of California against localities partially cuz I haven’t lived in California for a long time and I didn’t know they were doing that. And that sounds great to me. But it also kind of contradicts a story that I tell in the book, which is that I think I say that localism is on the march and I think there, I mean that localist arguments have become more and more familiar to us insofar as we might be a little surprised to hear that the state is taking such a strong line against localities in housing at this particular moment,

Jeff Wood (19m 17s):
You know, in our Russian nesting doll. I think the people that listen to the show are not surprised because we talk about it all the time. Yeah. But the people who are acted against in that way will call them NIMBY just as a general term, even though not everybody’s like that. But the NIMBYs are surprised, they are upset, they’re distraught, they have meetings all the time in which interestingly people on Twitter kind of sneak in and tell what they’re talking about. And so I think you’re seeing that here. I don’t think it’s a surprise, but also the people who aren’t necessarily fighting for more housing, I’m not gonna say NIMBYs, but I’m just gonna say that there’s a general, you know, kind of need for more housing across the United States, not just in California. And so I think that that argument of localism is hitting the people who, they wanna keep it the way it is, but there’s a lot of forces who are against them and maybe they don’t understand why the state is, is coming down on them so hard and they want to keep things the way they are.

Jeff Wood (20m 9s):
I mean, even tech moguls who argue that San Francisco should have built more housing are fighting against housing in their local community, whether that’s Palo Alto or any of the really rich suburbs Atherton on the peninsula, right? And so you also see this kind of cognitive dissonance from people too. I mean Steph Curry, even in his neighborhood was fighting housing changes that are coming from the state and somebody who I generally would hold in great esteem, but I’m like, hmm, you’re wrong on the housing issue, Steph. And so, you know, those are the things that I think are coming to a head. And I think that’s why your book is really interesting right now because historically localism has been something that people have seen as a benefit. But in this housing situation, because people are struggling and because it’s hitting them personally and because locally they’re being affected, I think that they’re seeing things in a different light and going up above where the local is causing them trouble, which is under zoning, over-regulating and not allowing more housing.

Trevor Latimer (21m 3s):
Don’t give my book to Localists cuz it, it has a, a playbook of all the arguments that you could possibly use and they might forget the second half of each chapter, but yeah. Yeah. And I think it’s worth mentioning at this stage that yeah, people can use localism very instrumentally. And I think that might be part of the reason why I focus so much on the arguments. You, you’re a localist when it fits with what you want and you’re not a localist when it doesn’t fit with what you want. I think I say in the book that there’s hardly ever a consistent localist because you end up biting a lot of bullets if you are,

Jeff Wood (21m 35s):
It’s interesting because I feel like there’s a fight going on at the state level and local level. There’s a lot of preemption laws that are being enacted around the country related to numerous things, whether it’s, you know, the don’t say gay stuff in Florida, whether it’s broadband in places like Tennessee, you know, gas, natural gas bans. There’s a lot of states that are telling local officials that they’re not allowed to ban natural gas in that this state is the, and even in the last couple weeks, Texas has come out and said labor laws, anything that you enact locally is null and void after we passed this bill because we should be the ones that are setting this, this regulation, which, you know, to folks in Austin that causes a freak out because you know, everybody gets a break in the hot sun over a hundred degrees at like, you know, three o’clock in the afternoon, but maybe there’s not a state law related to that.

Jeff Wood (22m 23s):
And so I think that there’s this tension between state law making and preemption that’s going on and local and I think it’s a lot of it’s political, right? It’s obviously, it’s a partisan thing. And that’s another question I had for you is what are the politics of localism? Like is it just partisanship? If my group is the one that’s making decisions, I’m happy with it. And that if that’s a local decision, then that’s even better. I’m curious about your thoughts on that.

Trevor Latimer (22m 44s):
So I do wanna say that it’s not partisan in the sense that Democrats are in favor of localism, Republicans are not in favor of localism because as we know, well you just mentioned some examples where liberals tend to be localists when we’re talking about labor laws or sanctuary cities or we had a ton of back and forth about during covid or on vaccine requirements, masking requirements. And I think I used this in the preface, which is there were a lot of liberal cities that imposed mask requirements where the state governments were against it and then some counties that refused to enforce statewide masking and vaccine mandate.

Trevor Latimer (23m 27s):
But there are also situations where you often hear small government conservatives saying we should be doing this or that at the state level rather than the national level. And then you’ll sometimes get conservatives wanting to go even lower than the state level. But all those things flip when the politics change. It’s not partisan in in the sense that democrats are or one and republicans of the other oftentimes partisan issues get recast as local non-local issues. But that’s just, I don’t wanna say coincidence, but it’s convenience to wage partisan battles. But I think there are cases of localism where they go completely askew of the normal left right divide.

Trevor Latimer (24m 12s):
And the housing one that you were just describing I think is one. And then there are some that are like purely academic and and public policy based, like the claim that the local governments are more efficient than the national government. That’s more of like an economist versus non-economists cleavage. So there are a lot of ways in which partisan divisions map onto the local non-local divide, but it doesn’t exhaust that space or doesn’t exhaust the distinction.

Jeff Wood (24m 37s):
Let’s talk about efficiency. I found that a really fascinating part of the book as well. And I think that the idea of people sorting with their feet is also something that is used very often now to think about whether cities should be able to do this, that or the other thing. If you don’t like it, you can leave. But really people can’t leave, they can’t go places. It’s very hard for the poor to move. And we’re finding that out with this kind of migration as it is. There’s a lot of places around the United States where there’s a lot of opportunity and there’s a lot of jobs and there’s a lot of housing growth and, and it’s cheaper et cetera. The, the Sunbelt is a, a famous example, but people who are in need of those jobs or maybe should be moving to go to greener pastures from where they are now aren’t able to because it’s so expensive to do so.

Jeff Wood (25m 20s):
And so it feels like that’s a argument as you mentioned, the book of the Rich and not necessarily an argument for everyone.

Trevor Latimer (25m 26s):
And actually in the book I do some, some kind of back of the envelope analysis to, I just base it on, I think it’s fed estimates of the amount of money that people have in their transactional bank accounts. So money people can spend in the moment versus average moving costs. And that’s not even counting like first and last month or a security deposit on an apartment. I think 60% of Americans can’t afford to

Jeff Wood (25m 50s):
Move. Yeah, I think you mentioned this number stuck in my head it was like $5,000, but I feel like it’s even more, 10,000 is probably if you add in first last month’s rent. Yeah. Moving costs if you need to get a truck, if you move yourself it might be cheaper, but it’s also your own labor that you’re, that you’re using. And that might be stressful as well to get a whole household into a truck and out of a truck. It’s expensive.

Trevor Latimer (26m 11s):
Oh, I’m glad you mentioned the psychological toll because I’ve moved about 10 times in my life and it’s like the worst thing that I have ever done, the most miserable thing I’ve ever done. And that includes my general exams in graduate school. And what it ends up doing is that the rich just doing dollars, what the poor do in stress when you’re moving, yeah, you can rent your own U-haul, pack your own boxes, put it into the truck, but

Jeff Wood (26m 35s):
That’s buy pieces for your friends because you need ’em to carry your couch

Trevor Latimer (26m 39s):
If you’re lucky to have friends, right? Yeah. Maybe that’s a time where you want your community to help help you, but then you’re gonna lose it once you move. But I’m glad you brought up that point because the vote with your feet or or the you can leave if you don’t like it, I think is a little, it’s not a little disingenuous, it’s a lot disingenuous. It’s actually used rhetorically to dismiss other people’s concerns.

Jeff Wood (26m 60s):
There’s also a discussion about sorting, right people sorting into neighborhoods, sorting into groups. And I think that’s something that has been talked about a lot going back to that political discussion as well is like sorting in partisanship and how that’s happened. And we actually had Clayton all on the show who was at the time at Stanford and now he’s at Santa Barbara. But he wrote a whole book about how, you know, when we built the interstates, people were able to sort and then it’s caused this, you know, dispersal of people from cities and it’s actually created a, a worse partisanship from that perspective where people are voting in the suburbs a certain way and people are voting in the cities a certain way. And I think that’s interesting because it kind of goes to that sorting and why that causes maybe some consternation over time,

Trevor Latimer (27m 39s):
But often the argument can also be that sorting is good. Yeah, it goes both ways. I think the localists that I think of usually use sorting as a positive thing, which is you get to, to live with people of like mind and then you’re able to choose the level of services you and your community members most desire or fits with your needs. I think that’s based on like a, a pretty abstract and real unrealistic version of of social life where all of a sudden we all want the same level of, we all want medium quality schools and medium quality, quality water, whereas that community wants high quality water and high quality schools. We all want the best. Maybe the argument is about how much we’re willing to pay for it, but, and many of these things I think are matters of justice, not about efficiency.

Trevor Latimer (28m 25s):
And that might be a prejudice of mine as kind of someone who studied economics but doesn’t really have that kind of pure cost benefit, efficiency based view of the world.

Jeff Wood (28m 35s):
It’s probably a good prejudice. I mean right now in Atlanta it’s happening, right? So you know, Buckhead wants to secede from the city and they have what, 20% of the population, but they make up like 40% of the tax intake of the city. And obviously Atlanta has a, a history of, you know, racial sorting and things like that. Most of the northern part of the city, north of the highway that splits Atlanta and half is white and and wealthy and the southern half is, is black and less wealthy. And so you see these kind of things happening all over the country or you have a state that wants to take over a city because they feel like they’re not operating it efficiently like we’re seeing in Mississippi, which, and so that’s something that happens too. So these examples are everywhere Yeah. Of this sorting but then also kind of detachment, pulling yourself away, sorting yourself away through political boundaries.

Trevor Latimer (29m 20s):
Yeah, the jurisdictional boundaries are a big deal and really important in this the education context, the K-12 education context and the sort of the undoing of integration in the United States because of white flight. And then I use examples in the book of, there’s a lot of school district secessions sorting doesn’t work unless you have individual communities with different jurisdictional boundaries. If you don’t have that, you can’t make different laws in those different jurisdictions. So if you have like a unitary system unlike ours where there aren’t these jurisdictional boundaries that have discretion over what kinds of things they can do in those, the sorting doesn’t work.

Trevor Latimer (30m 2s):
And so people who say sorting is good or that sorting produces these benefits will want there to be numerous local jurisdictions from which people can then shift across based on their preferences. The other part of that is that sorting also doesn’t work unless the local governments have enough discretion or power to make different decisions about how to allocate goods and services, right? If every city is only allowed, their tax rates can only waiver between 14 and 15%, you don’t have a lot of opportunity to offer different, in the economics world be bundles of goods and services,

Jeff Wood (30m 36s):
Something else that shows up a lot. And something I wanted to ask you about specifically is tax incentives, tax breaks, those types of things. Yeah. And, and we had this big discussion nationally about this when Amazon decided that it wanted to do a second headquarters. And so every city in the country who was large enough, I guess they took all these people off of what they were doing and they set them to work trying to get Amazon the best deal even though Amazon already knew where it was going at the start. And then Amazon used that material that they gave them to give them, you know, distribution centers or whatever. It was a big kind of hullabaloo for nothing. But I’m interested in kind of that idea of tax breaks and jurisdictional boundaries, but also localism as it pertains to those things because I feel like economic development is something that, you know, is touted as a local thing, whereas maybe it’s not so beneficial to that kind of geography that people are touting it in.

Trevor Latimer (31m 27s):
Yeah, the argument there is that if we locate Amazon in, they were considering Brooklyn, right? The idea would be that that would bring jobs into the community and that would bring economic activity into the community and that would make New York City better off that would lead to local growth. And that could even be true, that could even be true. It depends on a lot of different assumptions, but the thing to remember is that those jobs come from somewhere. Someone is losing a job in order to give Amazon the job. There’s a, there’s a fixed number of jobs so you can make more jobs up to the, the level of, you know, it’s all the natural rate of unemployment, but that’s national growth, right?

Trevor Latimer (32m 7s):
So the, the argument here is that those kinds of tax incentives are really just distributional. They just redistribute the economic growth and there’s only certain kinds of policies that actually lead to pure growth at the local level. And those are often infrastructure investments and those help everyone. So these kinds of tax incentive structures are bigger than neighbor, which I’m sure everyone on who listens to your show has heard before that argument. What I add in the book is that you can kind of link that with the kind of prolo ideology and kind of map that or use those kinds of arguments as smokescreen or cover for the idea that oh yeah, we’re just creating economic growth for the local community, but really it’s just actually making one community better off rather than another.

Trevor Latimer (32m 59s):
And then if, if it’s the case that all these tax incentive programs are zero sum in the way, I think they are, what you mentioned about city employees dropping what they were doing in order to pursue this policy is, is pure waste. So overall it’s, it’s, it makes everyone worse off.

Jeff Wood (33m 17s):
Yeah, I, I think that is the case and that’s what happened is it, it wasted so many man hours and paid time that these city employees were doing just to try to catch some of this. Yeah. Said, you know, 50,000 jobs or whatever it was gonna be,

Trevor Latimer (33m 31s):
It’d be better for New York City to build the Brooklyn waterfront now. Yeah. Anything that leads to more economic growth. So you build the, the Brooklyn waterfront out and then vendors come to the Brooklyn Waterfront and people buy things there and it leads to expanded economic activity. It’s a ma, it’s a matter of expanding versus rearranging.

Jeff Wood (33m 50s):
One of the things that I think people on the show understand and are interested about and you mentioned in the book is the localism of infrastructure or the localism of entities that control transportation. And so I think the biggest example of this is New York MTA and how it’s run by the governor and not somebody in the city or a council in the city or anything like that. Maybe that’s devolution rather than, you know, localism. And so I’m wondering, you know, what’s the difference between say localism and like there’s devolution, there’s also decentralization, there’s other terms that might mean similar things but don’t quite

Trevor Latimer (34m 25s):
Yeah, I actually think that devolution overlaps a lot with localism and in fact I think that devolution is kind of a, a creature or a version of localism. And I think the main difference I would say as devolution is the claim that right, we should shift power to a lower level this. That’s how I understand. Localism also says that it, we should make decisions locally or more locally. It’s just that localism. I see that having this whole constellation of arguments that go with it, evolution is a policy proposal. It’s like we should do this. Localism says we should do this, but it also gives us a ton of reasons why we should do it.

Trevor Latimer (35m 5s):
Decentralization. I think there’s a bigger distinction between decentralization and localism than there is between devolution and localism in part because decentralization is often a claim about a system rather than a particular place. Localism is like bringing things down to the lower level, whereas decentralization has spread things out. It can mean localism because if you spread things out in a particular way, they could become more concentrated in particular spaces, but they might not. Right.

Jeff Wood (35m 34s):
Yeah. I’m also interested in the human nature argument and I think the thing that was most interesting to me is the part on knowledge transfer and thinking about how it’s good to be local because you have more knowledge or you have more information than maybe the feds might have, which is species. But I’m curious like what’s the general argument about nature and the idea that the local is the best place to collect knowledge, to disseminate knowledge, to organize better.

Trevor Latimer (36m 6s):
I’m glad you brought up knowledge because you asked me earlier in this podcast about what argument I had the most difficulty grappling with. And I gave you the wrong answer because you’ve now reminded me that it is the knowledge argument and that this is the shortest chapter in the book. And it’s because I don’t deny that there are certain kinds of knowledge that are irreducibly local or maybe not irreducibly local, but people who are close to the thing have a lot more opportunities and are much more likely to know certain kinds of things than a distant official. And what I deny, I think, and what I wanna say in response to that is that doesn’t mean that they should get to make the decision. They have this knowledge and this knowledge should be accounted for or should be included in making the decision.

Trevor Latimer (36m 51s):
But oftentimes the people who have the knowledge are the people who can then hoard the knowledge, use that knowledge to their advantage and so on. A lot of these knowledge arguments come out of, I think an era in which central governments across the world sort of rode rough shot over local people and ignored local knowledge leading to all these kinds of mistakes or losses of certain kinds of knowledge where for instance, certain kinds of agricultural practices, they work in that place and the local people know that because they’ve been doing it for thousands of years or whatever. I think what I wanna say is that that local knowledge is important, but it shouldn’t be hoarded by local people.

Trevor Latimer (37m 33s):
Local people should have mechanisms to transmit that knowledge to other decision makers. And that local governments or local, local people should be making decisions with higher level governments cuz higher level governments have a different kind of information. They have diff they have information for how this works in different places. They also are the, the unit that can take that local knowledge and spread it elsewhere and make that kind of knowledge available to others. Like what if community A has these kinds of agricultural practices that work really well and community B is actually the same in all important respects, but they don’t have these agricultural practices. If you have an insular local view, you might not ever be able to get those agricultural practices to the other community that could take advantage of them.

Trevor Latimer (38m 16s):
And so yeah, I, I really do respect the empirical reality that local people have access to certain kinds of knowledge that other people who aren’t as near to it don’t have.

Jeff Wood (38m 27s):
I think that the example you give in the, in the book is really informative in that you know, Ethiopia was trying to rethink how people were dispersed on the land and so they moved all these local farmers to places where they weren’t familiar with. And so a lot of people died. There’s a lot of famine. There is something to be said about understanding how the soil is and what time of year you need to plant and what you do if something goes wrong, which has been passed on from generation to generation. But if you move that person off that specific plot of land that they know so well, it all goes to hell. And so that local knowledge is actually really important. And I think that that point was really well made when you were discussing that.

Trevor Latimer (39m 2s):
Yeah, cuz I absolutely accept that and I think my only reply to it or the weak reply that I make about it in the book is like that information can be transmitted, that information can be given to scientists in the capital and local people and the scientists can work together and say, hey, we totally understand why this works. Have you also tried this thing that might improve on your practices even more? And then like I said a second ago, which is transmit that practice elsewhere, the problem in those cases was hubris on the part of the Ethiopian government hubris or flagrant disregard for human lives or pure idiocy. I mean Localists sometimes will say, oh, we’re localists or we think local knowledge is really important because it keeps us away from this situation.

Trevor Latimer (39m 48s):
And I don’t think we need to be localists to admit or to agree that what Ethiopia did was bad, wrong and stupid. Don’t do it like that again, you don’t need to be a localist to avoid that lesson. We take the lesson, those of us who are skeptical of localism and that’s why that chapter, I think I’m most sympathetic to the knowledge argument cuz I can just accept it.

Jeff Wood (40m 9s):
One of the things I like about the book is that you say many times that you’re not necessarily against localism, you just want people to make good arguments for it rather than just accepting that it’s the way to go just because that’s the way it is. And I think that’s a really important point to make and I think it’s interesting to have an argument against something even though you think it’s, you think it might be okay in some instances. And so I’m wondering where that kind of line of thinking came from.

Trevor Latimer (40m 33s):
Well, I think there are some examples where localism is absolutely the right thing to do. I just, I see the empirical world and that has worked in the book. I have a consequentialist kind of approach to making these kinds of decisions and it’s a very loose version, kind of non-academic version, which is do whatever we need to do to make people’s lives go well. And I don’t mean that in, in like a means, ends sense, but that we judge the quality of a arrangement by whether it makes people’s wi lives go better. And if there are cases in which doing things more locally make people’s lives better, I am for them.

Trevor Latimer (41m 15s):
I just think that that happens far, far less often than certain kinds of proponents of localism assume or attempt to convince us of. And it’s, it’s because those arguments are not as good as they think they are. The intuitions often behind them have something to them. It’s just they’re often taken too far or taken ideologically or taken without criticism. And so the book is very much getting people to stop and think about these arguments before deploying them in ways that could lead to harm. I should mention incidentally is that two reviews have come out of the book from a online magazine called Front Porch Republic.

Trevor Latimer (41m 56s):
And Front Porch Republic is, I would call a bastian of localist thinking. And I have gotten exactly the reaction that I wanted to get from that magazine. Well, one person understood completely what I was was getting at, which is like I, I’ve laid out these arguments for localism, I’ve disagreed with most of them, but I’m ultimately coming from the same place of trying to get to the right answer for people. One person, you know, didn’t like it at all, but I I mentioned that already. But that, that was the goal is to get people to rethink. It does have one kind of side product in the book is that I, I put things stronger than I actually mean them often in the book.

Trevor Latimer (42m 37s):
I’m, I’m a little polemical from time to time and, and poke fun at localists. But it’s an attempt to shock people or to provoke them into thinking about these kinds of arguments in a more critical way. And, and you having read the book, you know that the last chapter I basically try to say, Hey, even if you completely disagree with everything in this book, here are 12 things you should think about. I don’t know if it’s 12 might be 14, but just ways of, of keeping you from falling into these localist traps. So I’m pleased that that was the reaction of someone who was a localist. And it kind of was the whole point of the book.

Jeff Wood (43m 11s):
What was the angry person angry about? Or what are angry people angry about when they’re angry about your discussion topic?

Trevor Latimer (43m 20s):
So in this particular case, we talked a little bit earlier about how I’m trying to bring in a lot of different strands, I would call strands of localism. And a lot of those strands come from completely different, I would say segments of the populous segments of the academy. Like the efficiency people are not the same as the nature people or the belonging people and the people on front porch Republic, for the most part, they have a particular vision of the good life about how we should form communities at the local level and change the way we interact with other people and take a greater concern for the places in which we live. And to build a certain kind of holistic community that’s a one version of the localist argument.

Trevor Latimer (44m 2s):
We should become localists in order to focus more at the local level and develop a certain kind of community and way of life. And that’s an argument that I can totally understand that is a legitimate, very attractive for people of certain deeper commitments to accept, right? But the person who was not happy about the book was basically suggesting that I didn’t consider that argument seriously enough or delve into it too much enough at all. I didn’t take his particular version of localism as the whole book. I think that’s my, the why takeaway is that like I only had one chapter really for that particular line of arguments and the complaint was that I didn’t understand the position that he was coming from.

Trevor Latimer (44m 44s):
And I actually do think I understand it. I just dealt with it in unfortunately not as much detail as he might have liked. And then the other side of it is that there is a kind of a sense in which I just disagree with the idea of developing holistic communities where we have these deep relationships with one another. I, I have more of a maybe practical or realistic view of how people interact in the world where some kinds of interactions are deep and important and others are transactional and others are, we avoid altogether. Maybe that’s because I live in New York City, both the people that wrote about my book lived in obviously smaller cities and because New York is the largest but different kind of orientations to the world and that, that’s the kind of criticism that I’ve received.

Trevor Latimer (45m 33s):
And I don’t, I don’t mind that criticism because it’s, yeah, I could have written more on that. I just was doing a different thing in the book.

Jeff Wood (45m 40s):
Is there something that surprised you when you were doing your research or thinking about the book? Is there something that you came away from after writing the book thinking, oh wow, my mind changed on that? This

Trevor Latimer (45m 51s):
Is a really great question because the book is called Small isn’t Beautiful, but my objection is not to smallness. And I think that’s what I, what I really learned in the book is that those two things, sometimes local and small tend to line up, but they don’t always. And the reasons why we have to support, say small business versus local business are importantly different. Small businesses are typically, and by small business we actually usually mean independent business, not small. We don’t care that it’s, that it’s medium sized or large. We care that it’s not Amazon or it’s not multinational. So I’m, I’m actually comfortable being in favor of small business, independent business, but not local business.

Trevor Latimer (46m 34s):
So I, I’ve understood that. I have to recognize that the intuitions of some people towards localism are not for the local itself and that it’s helpful perhaps to help redirect people and under help them understand that really what you’re caring about is not the place in which things happen, but the way in which things are done or the relationship a business has to its community or the kinds of businesses practices that they adopt. There’s a great, great book that I should call out called Labor in the Locavore, which points out that a lot of the, the places, I think this is about agriculture in the Hudson Valley, where a lot of the local food that we’re getting is actually produced in farms that have terrible labor practices.

Trevor Latimer (47m 21s):
And many people who probably see themselves as leftists or left coastal elites who wanna go to the Union Square farmer’s market market would probably not like to know that the people who grew the crops and brought them to market were being paid under the table without health insurance. And so understanding the ways in which people’s intuitions are often completely right and the ways and the framing of the arguments that they use are not the best and could be reframed and help people kind of understand what really matters to them.

Jeff Wood (47m 55s):
Well the book is called Small Isn’t Beautiful, the Case Against Localism. Where can folks find their books? If they wanna get copies?

Trevor Latimer (48m 2s):
You can buy it on Amazon, but after the conversation we just have, if you go to the publisher’s website, which is Brookings, you can buy directly from Brookings, but they also include some options for independent book sellers. And I’ve heard you on your podcast mention one, and I thought I would just let you kick over to one of the great options where you can still order online and have access to the same distribution network, but at ultimately get it from a local book seller. And if you happen to be in New York City, they have it at book

Jeff Wood (48m 30s):
Culture. Awesome. Yes, you can get it at places like IndieBound or bookshop.org. We have actually a bookshop.org affiliate site, but if you want to have your local bookstore represented it, it’ll send them a couple dollars.

Trevor Latimer (48m 43s):
I would be okay with people buying it from a small business that’s not local.

Jeff Wood (48m 47s):
That’s good.

Trevor Latimer (48m 48s):
Can I actually recommend that people buy it from an independent bookstore outside of their locality just to test it

Jeff Wood (48m 54s):
Out? Sure, yeah, absolutely. See what happens.

Trevor Latimer (48m 56s):
See if you get the same warm and fuzzies.

Jeff Wood (48m 58s):
Same warm and fuzzies. I like that. We love the puppies and butterflies and the warm and fuzzies. Trevor, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Trevor Latimer (49m 5s):
Yeah, that was really great talking to you.