re:Build (August 2019)
Landownership as freedom, landownership as theft
Hi everybody, I hope you’ve been enjoying your summer!
Quick Update: I was feeling out of shape, so I started a three month experiment to keep me motivated. This morning was the first of three 5km races I’ll be running, one each month between now and October. I put together a training program that combines running x4 a week and strength training. I’ll repeat and tweak this between races to see how much I can improve over 12 weeks. In late July, my baseline 5km time was 23:10. This morning I finished in 20:30. I expect the easy gains are behind me, so my goal is to break 20:00.
Post-race with my training partner
re:Think — The Great Land Robbery by Vann Newkirk
Landownership as freedom, landownership as theft. Both of these statements are true, and the tensions between them drive the constantly changing balance of economic and political power in modern societies. This is the argument put forward in, Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing. On the one hand, landownership has been a primary driver of economic growth. On the other, owning land is exclusionary. To become a landowner means excluding others from using that land.
The Great Land Robbery is an excellent piece in The Atlantic. It examines the history of property rights in America and the dispossession of 1 million black families from their farmland. It’s the clearest example that I’ve found of the tension between landownership as both freedom and theft.
Over the 20th century, black people in the U.S. were dispossessed of 12 million acres of land. Half of that loss — 6 million acres — occurred over just two decades, from 1950 to 1969. “That’s an average of 820 acres a day — an area the size of New York’s Central Park erased with each sunset.”
There’s no question that racism and illegal pressures played a role in this mass dispossession. But thousands of individual decisions by white people, motivated by the freedom of landownership, influenced laws and policies that amounted to the legally sanctioned theft of land from black farmers. Property rights aren’t natural and absolute, they’re variable and inherently political.
As someone who buys land to build and sell homes, I’m reminded that even ethical and responsible corporations should acknowledge the historic context within which it’s operating. For Newkirk, understanding the corporate dominance of agriculture means acknowledging a history of laws and policies that have responded to the biases of those with power — “Even assuming that every acre under management by big corporate interests in the Delta has been acquired by way of ethical-investment principles, the nature of the mid-century dispossession and its multiple layers of legitimation raise the question of whether responsible investment in farmland there is even possible.”
re:Work — Praxis Planning
If you know me, you probably know that I work as a development manager with LC Development Group building attainable housing. But I’ve also been consulting on housing projects for other clients since I graduated in 2016. This month, I named my numbered corp and created an online home for my consulting services — you can check it out here. It’s quick, it’s dirty, and there are some URL issues to sort out (it’s permanent home will be praxisplanning.ca) but I was set on getting something up this week. Let me know what you think!
re:Read — Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
This book explores how insights from computer algorithms can be applied to our daily lives. My favourite chapter explains the Explore / Exploit concept from computer science and how it applies different areas of human life.
Everyday we face decisions that create a tension between trying new things and committing to something that seems to be best. Where to eat? Who do we spend time with? How do we invest? Manage our time? Pick a career path? In essence, where do we exert our energy?
Computer scientists approach these questions through the multi-armed bandit problem (which comes from slang for a slot machine, aka a one armed bandit). In a room full of slot machines, some pay out at a higher probability than others but you don’t know which. What’s your strategy? You need to decide how much time you’ll explore different machines and how much time you exploit a machine you feel is paying off. It’s intuitive but the balance isn’t obvious. The math suggests your strategy should depend on how long you’re in the casino. If you’ve got a long time, it’s worth exploring. If you’re about to leave, the return on finding a better pay-out is smaller. By observing someone’s strategy, you can infer what interval their optimizing for.
Consider the behaviour of children. They seem sort of random. Babies stick everything in their mouths, they’re always interested in the next thing. It’s not low impulse control. In fact, it can be seen as the optimal strategy. As Christian puts it, “if you just burst through the doors of life's casino, and you have 80 years of life ahead of you, it makes a lot of sense to run around pulling handles at random”.
The same is true for older people. They’re resistant to change and have fewer friends than younger people. But you can build a mathematical argument that older people are simply in the exploit phase of their life. They know what they like, what matters to them, and recognize they have limited time. They're doing the optimal thing given where they are in that interval of time.
There’s another great bit about how Explore / Exploit applies to Hollywood and 10 other concepts explored in the book. To be completely honest, I’m not finished reading but it’s been so interesting that I wanted to share!
Thanks for reading. Until next month!
Angus