Episode Nine: The National Cheems Mindset
Ever since Normielisation’s groundbreaking work on cheems mindset, I’ve been mulling it over: even more so since Pirate Wires wrote this great piece on the contrast between pro-growth Miami and hyper-NIMBY San Francisco. San Fran isn’t just cheems - progressivism so insane you put the Weathermen in charge of your legal system is a different thing - but overall Minion Man’s paradigm works very well to understand the difference between the two.
After all, there’s nothing cheems about this:
Or this:
Or this:
Say what you will about Mayor Suarez, but he’s out there hustling. He wants his city to grow and attract more talent, and if some regulatory arbitrage is what it takes, what harm did that ever do anyone? I’m not a specialist in Miami politics and no one doubt someone more informed has a list of various bad policies he has or dumb things he’s done, but judged purely on the level of vibes, this is just terrific.
We don’t get things like this in Britain, although to be fair to the metro mayors, some of them are giving it a half-decent shot (no, not you Sadiq, you’re useless). Say what you will about nationalizing and extensively tarting up the local airport, but it’s not cheems. It may not work out, but if so they can always sell the land for housing. The Manchester tram network expansion is also decidedly not-cheems, and some good things along similar lines are happening in Nottingham, where the city centre was a giant building site the last time I visited. It wasn’t, for now, very aesthetically pleasing, but Things Were Happening.
Overall, though, Britain is just far too cheems. Tom Forth has moaned over the years about the absurdity of having the country’s leading research universities in places that just don’t build anything (Oxford, Cambridge, London - but especially Oxford). He’s right. If Oxford won’t build, a pro-growth government would tear down the colleges and rebuild them, brick by brick, in Hull or Grimsby or Bicester or really anywhere that will. The spillovers you get from world-class research are inevitably going to be very limited if they take place in a small town that won’t expand outwards, and has onerous height restrictions to block anyone trying to build up.
NIMBYism is of course the quintessence of the cheems mindset, but once you know the concept, you see it everywhere. Cheems mindset is the Facebook comments like this, in reaction to a 13-year-old boy getting blown out to sea in unexpectedly strong offshore winds before being rescued (as if teenage boys could or should ever be prevented from taking risks!).
The National Cheems Mindset is perhaps partly a product of population ageing. When you have too many old people relative to the number of young, their naturally more risk-averse voices start to dominate the discourse, public and private. The result is a form of social paralysis, where the losses that come from limiting risk-taking and trying to stop failure can never be discussed. Nor would I be surprised if a year or more locked at home for fear of a deadly virus had made things worse, on the margin.
The worst form of National Cheems Mindset, however, is undeniably that which possesses the government. After all, what’s stopping the British state from explicitly targeting 3% growth a year, and doing whatever it takes - slash taxes, build new cities - to achieve that goal? Hardly the absence of a majority, or the whims of the bond market. They just don’t want it enough. The contrast with the US could not be more stark. They want nice things very badly, and between the Fed and the White House, by God they’re going to print enough money to have them. The Biden people have learned from the failures of the Obama years, and the partial successes of Trump, that you have to go big or go home in the fight for growth. There is no alternative.
But since there’s no sign of an outbreak of Miami Mindset on a national level, perhaps the best those of us who care about growth and progress can do is go local. Fight for devolution - not to absurd institutions like the Welsh Assembly, but to historic cities, towns, and even individual streets - and build better local institutions with real power and ambition. The Metro Mayors are a decent start, after all, so there’s something to build on. For those of us interested in progress, it’s not just Westminster that matters, and success can be found elsewhere.