Submission statement: This article details how 17th century Britain managed to overcome what it calls the “stakeholder state” (which was really just the remnants of feudalism, but I can see the parallels to today) and simplify planning and development, arguably contributing to the industrial revolution.
!PING YIMBY&UK
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17th- and 18th-century peasants protecting their common grazing rights were not, in fact, comparable to modern-day wealthy suburbanites (NIMBYs) blocking high-density housing.
The Enclosure Acts were a brutal, state-sanctioned upward transfer of wealth, and saying vulnerable subsistence farmers were just veto players that had to be bulldozed, to justify the mass, coercive displacement of the rural poor feels cynical to me.
Sure, enclosures boosted aggregate agricultural yields, but this can’t be your only metric of success. Do you know what happened to the displaced rural poor after the enclosures?
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Submission statement: This article details how 17th century Britain managed to overcome what it calls the “stakeholder state” (which was really just the remnants of feudalism, but I can see the parallels to today) and simplify planning and development, arguably contributing to the industrial revolution.
!PING YIMBY&UK
17th- and 18th-century peasants protecting their common grazing rights were not, in fact, comparable to modern-day wealthy suburbanites (NIMBYs) blocking high-density housing.
The Enclosure Acts were a brutal, state-sanctioned upward transfer of wealth, and saying vulnerable subsistence farmers were just veto players that had to be bulldozed, to justify the mass, coercive displacement of the rural poor feels cynical to me.
Sure, enclosures boosted aggregate agricultural yields, but this can’t be your only metric of success. Do you know what happened to the displaced rural poor after the enclosures?