British Problems, Face-Eating Leopards, and the Ambition Membrane
Off-Ramps for 22 May 2025
Welcome to Off-Ramps! Today I’ll highlight three interesting pieces that I think you will enjoy reading, plus offer links to more. Please enjoy all of these on your morning commute, or save them for your weekend.
British Problems Are Our Problems
...over two thirds of the growth in Britain's motorway network since 2012 has come not from actually building new roads, but because the Ordnance Survey are more accurate at measuring them.
, Why Does Britain Feel So Poor?
Last year I complained to a German visitor that Canada was not a serious country. He thought about this and asked which G7 nation was a serious country. We thought about it for a bit and were unable to come up with a good answer.
That conversation was on my mind as I read this piece from M.F. Robbins about the weight of British problems. The UK has the world's sixth-largest economy, so why, he asks, does public life there seem so impoverished? The culprits he blames will be familiar to Canadians and Americans both: stagnant growth, plummeting public sector productivity, ever-rising infrastructure costs, and a political system that seems incapable of taking these problems seriously.
The consequences are tangible and severe. Servicing the UK’s debt costs £100 billion annually but the economy isn’t growing per capita, so that burden becomes heavier each year. Costs of everything are spiraling: health care, social services, school transport, and more. There is not enough housing, and the high price of what housing there is chokes productivity. Of particular note to me was that public procurement costs are unmanageable, whether for military procurement, nuclear power stations, or high-speed rail, costs four times what similar projects do elsewhere… in large part because of staggeringly-great consultation and permitting burdens.
One line stands out: Sir Jon Thompson, the head of the London–Birmingham high-speed rail project, is quoted as saying “To build a railway between Euston and Curzon Street in Birmingham, I need 8,276 consents from other public bodies, planning, transport, the Environment Agency or Natural England. They don’t care whether parliament did or didn’t approve building a railway.”
For North American readers, this should sound alarmingly familiar. Our infrastructure costs have similarly ballooned; California's high-speed rail or Toronto’s commuter-rail electrification have similarly reached staggeringly high costs for projects that are so far behind that they may never be completed. Like Britain, we're struggling with housing affordability crises that eat away disposable income. And like Britain, we make the barriers to new infrastructure construction so high that little gets built.
Britain's struggles are the USA’s and Canada’s, only more severe. The difficulties there are a preview of the difficulties we will face if we don’t act to address our own problems. We have more room to maneuver; I hope we take advantage of it.
I think a good place to begin would be with Thompson’s complaint. If Parliament approves building a railway, we might take that as the end of the permission-getting process, not the beginning.
The Sudden Unpopularity of Face-Eating Leopards
You could [Fool] Around, you Didn't Find Out... The chaos was caged. And voters could 'enjoy' the chaotic rhetoric… without the actual chaotic reality.
, FAFDO
In the same article, Robbins refers to this piece. As Alfred Pennyworth intoned in The Dark Knight:
Ansell’s piece is about these people, the sort who enjoy endorsing chaotic, destructive policy. Ansell’s thesis is that such people do enjoy voting for it, and peacocking how much they are in favour of it… but they don’t want to actually experience its consequences. They practice FADFO: they Fool Around, but Don’t Find Out.
Ansell identifies two key groups driving this phenomenon. One group feels financially marginalized, and feels that the social order has no loyalty to them, and they make this clear by showing off how little loyalty they feel in return. But the other is quite the opposite: they are so comfortable financially that they believe themselves insulated from risk, and so can make bold, attention-getting statements at no cost. As per Ansell, this explains the odd coalition of the disaffected and the privileged that makes up contemporary populism.
For years, this approach worked well. The two greatest examples of FADFOing, Brexit and Trump 1, incurred little obvious blowback, the former because it took so long to implement and the latter because the establishment slow-walked or blocked the damage. Ansell is afraid that FADFO is now transitioning to FAFO, and the unfiltered chaos of Trump 2 means that voters will actually Find Out.
Gloomily, Ansell thinks that Finding Out won’t actually renew the old centrism, but instead make populism even more cartoonishly clumsy in response. I have a sunnier perspective. My optimism rests on my view that Ansell missed a third FADFO constituency, and I think the broadest one: the people who regard politics and policy as a species of mass entertainment, like wrestling or NHL hockey. They treated the subject as an arena for their team to flex on the other team, and nothing more than that. Why?
Not because they want to burn down the system; and not because they don’t think the system’s failure would hurt them. No, they did so because they didn’t see any connection between politics and their own lives, so why not make the choice that was maximally dramatic or exciting?
Now, of course, they do see that connection. It’s been made perfectly clear, in consumer prices and travel restrictions and exports and jobs.
In Canada, this new understanding is the principal reason we have Prime Minister Carney today rather than Prime Minister Poilievre. I am cautiously optimistic we will, in time, see similar changes in the USA.
The Ambition Membrane
I'd hit an invisible threshold, an ambition asymptote without realizing it... It wasn't a wall or solid threshold at all. It's more like a cell membrane. Permeable. Good ideas could flow through, be absorbed, an input to something greater.
, Reflections on the Roots of Progress Institute Fellowship
I wrote two weeks ago about how the success of Changing Lanes rested in part on my experience as a Roots of Progress Institute Fellow; specifically, how it gave me a community to belong to and a sense that my advocacy for mobility innovation was contributing to something greater than my own amusement.
Another fellow from my cohort, Grant Mulligan, has a similar perspective. Grant shares three ‘we're not in Kansas anymore’ moments from his own life, in which he brushed up against what he thought were the limits of his mental and social world; and discovered those limits could be surpassed.
Stories like this, where we reflect on how much of what holds us back is our own minds, are always useful, but I enjoyed Grant’s because he makes it clear how the growth of his own agency was spurred by finding the right community. In the progress movement, Grant found people who started from the position that the world could be changed for the better; that the principal requirement to do so was merely the willingness to work hard; and that one needn’t wait for someone else’s permission to begin. Indeed, bold vision is practically required, because that is what attracts talent, resources, and momentum. These things flow toward difficulty rather than being repelled by them. Grant quotes one of the Fellowship advisors: “Hard problems are easier to solve than easy problems because hard problems attract great people”.
If that sounds like a community you’d like to be part of, the application window for the Roots of Progress Institute 2025 Blog Building Intensive Fellowship is open, but will close on June 1.
The Rest Stop
In lieu of a fourth piece, here’s a new feature of Off-Ramps I’m toying with: pieces I think are worth reading, but for which I don’t feel compelled to offer extensive framing or commentary. Enjoy!
New York magazine recently featured a breathless endorsement of a book telling the story of some shocking psychological experiments. Unfortunately the point of the book is that those experiments were all fake and the experimenter lied about them. This means that the endorser didn’t actually read the book, and no one from the magazine noticed
There was a fad (?) last year for Carjitsu, i.e., mixed-martial-arts combat, but practiced inside an automobile
From ten years ago, Kim Stanley Robinson on all the reasons why humans will never leave the Solar System. I think Robinson is right about that, but the piece is surprisingly indifferent to the still-real possibilities of terraforming Mars and Venus
Friend of Changing Lanes (and, like Grant and myself, RPI Fellow)
is co-founding the Golden Gate Institute for AI, which will attempt to help everyone understand the nature, current state, and likely future trajectories of AI betterIn my interview with Sandra Rothbard, I had to cut some material about her work building New York’s ‘blue highway’, that is, using the East and Hudson Rivers as second-last-mile links for freight deliveries to Manhattan; that project is now in operation