Sprawl, the President, Waymo, and the Kids-on-Boxes Meme

Off-Ramps for 17 April 2025

Welcome to Off-Ramps! Today I’ll highlight four interesting pieces (or sets of short pieces) that I think you will enjoy reading. Please enjoy these on your morning commute, or save them for your weekend.

1. An Attempt to Defend Sprawl

Even if all the regulatory restraints were removed tomorrow, developers couldn't find enough land to satisfy America's housing needs inside established areas.

“Why America Should Sprawl” by Conor Dougherty

Conor Dougherty goes full #slatepitch in the pages of the New York Times, arguing that sprawl is Good, Actually and we need more of it to fix our housing crisis. As proof, he points to fact that last year the state of California built just under 100,000 homes, while metro Dallas alone built 72,000. As supply dries up in America’s coasts, the Sun Belt is making up the difference. Dougherty doesn’t point out, but could have, that where the housing goes, so too go the people, and the economic dynamism.

Dougherty is right that sprawl is, in some ways, just a pejorative synonym for growth, which we lack. And he is also right that up-zoning alone is insufficient to serve that growth. There isn’t enough space to add 4-to-8 million new homes within existing urban areas. New cities are needed, as friend of Changing Lanes

Jeff Fong

has been writing about for a while now.

But live as a contrarian, die as a contrarian; Dougherty skates by the fact that sprawl also refers to a specific kind of growth, namely auto-centric, auto-dependent infrastructure that faces real difficulty evolving into more-urban forms.

In his article, Dougherty claims places like Plano and Frisco show how sprawl eventually evolves, becoming “cities in their own right” that “will come to look and feel more like central Dallas”. Yet he glosses over how car-dependent design creates traffic headaches that only get worse over time. The article's own examples undermine its optimism: as per material in the story itself, Princeton, Texas, which Dougherty features prominently, already has “godawful traffic”, well before it reaches its expected population. And there’s the case of the real estate agent who moved to Celina because she was “tired of spending hours in traffic on the way to showings”.

Dougherty claims sprawl is “how cities are built”, comparing modern exurbs to ancient Rome's “suburbium”. Ancient Rome and its suburbs grew grew dense before cars existed, of course. In contrast, modern suburbs are built around highways, wide roads, and parking lots from their inception. When Dougherty writes that “modern, car-centric cities will probably never become as dense as places whose streets were designed for pedestrians”, he's acknowledging the flaw in his take without confronting it. He briefly mentions dense “total communities” with “walkable streets”, but doesn't explain how these features fit with the vast tracts of single-family homes and car-dependent infrastructure shown in all of the piece’s accompanying photos.

Yes, we need more housing, and we need to build on new land to get enough of it. But copying postwar development patterns wastes a chance to create growing areas where people can eventually get around without cars. I think too-clever attempts to reclaim the word sprawl will undermine that effort.

2. How to Help the President

…one of my most important decisions as chairman of the FCC was the time I did not do what he [the President] asked me to do.

“A Medal After Ignoring Presidential Orders” by Newton Minow

On X, Nell Minow draws our attention to a story her father Newton told, about his time serving as chair of the FCC. For context, the incident he’s describing happened during the Kennedy administration; he recounted it in 2016; and he passed away, at age 97, in 2023.

Minow was an opinionated man, perhaps best known for a speech he gave in 1961 in which he told an audience of television executives that their product was so awful that television had become a “vast wasteland”. (He made an exception for The Twilight Zone.) He continued to ask “Why is so much of television so bad?” After naming some of the challenges the networks faced, he concluded that “Unquestionably, these are tough problems not susceptible to easy answers. But I am not convinced that you have tried hard enough to solve them”. It’s a good speech; read the whole thing.

Minow didn’t like the quality of broadcast television, and it returned the favour. Notoriously, Gilligan’s Island, a program he certainly would have regarded as jejune, named the ship on the show the S.S. Minnow. You know, the ship that everyone was depending on but that failed in its duty and ended up a battered, rotting hulk.

Anyhow, there came an evening when President Kennedy called Minow at home. JFK was angry about some news coverage he regarded as both unfair and damaging to his policy agenda. He ordered Minow: “Do something about it!”

In other words, the chair of the FCC was being ordered to take punitive action against a news broadcaster for saying something the president didn’t like.

Minow agreed that he would, hung up the phone, and went on with his evening. The next day, he called the White House and left a message to be passed on, namely that JFK “was lucky to have a friend at the FCC who knew not to pay attention to the president when the president was angry”.

How did JFK respond? Read Minow’s own account of it, and reflect on his closing words: “Sometimes doing the right thing is doing nothing. Sometimes doing nothing is what the civic health of a democracy needs.” As his daughter notes, these are words that speak especially to our present moment.

3. Waymo Winning San Francisco

You may recall that the latest J.D. Power Mobility Confidence Index, published last fall, found that in general, Americans mistrusted automated vehicles. It seems to me a more nuanced story. Trust in automated vehicles is here; it’s just not evenly distributed.

Take Mario Sanoguera and Rachel Wu, who chose to take their newborn daughter home from the hospital in a Waymo robotaxi, on the grounds that they wouldn’t trust such a precious cargo to a human driver. They report that by the time their daughter was six weeks old, she had already taken approximately 30 Waymo trips.

Meanwhile, Waymo's cars are becoming networking hubs, with riders leaving handwritten notes in the vehicles; reported notes include startup CEOs seeking software engineers to single tech workers looking for dates. These analog messages leverage the selection effect of Waymo ridership, which seems reasonable to me. If you're in a robotaxi in 2025, you're likely tech-adjacent and innovation-friendly.

All of which says to me that time is on Waymo’s side. Once allowed into a city, they will gradually convert enough of the population to be a going concern, especially given their early adopters will be the younger, wealthier, and more open-to-experience cohorts. And their children will grow up taking automated mobility for granted.

4. That Meme Tho

Unfortunately for us, this little picture with the boxes represents the undoing of practically everything we have been trying to achieve in our debates over equality and social justice for the past half-century.

“Why Philosophers Hate that ‘Equity’ Meme” by Joseph Heath

In a sharp critique published earlier this week at

In Due Course

, Changing Lanes’ favourite living philosopher, Joe Heath, explains why academics roll their eyes when they see the ubiquitous Equity Meme, the one that shows three people of different heights standing on boxes to watch a baseball game. The image, which now defines ‘equity’ in countless DEI training sessions and social-media posts, makes philosophers want to weep with rage.

Simple, effective, and wrong

Heath argues that the meme has accomplished what decades of conservative arguments couldn't: it has saddled equity advocates with an indefensible position.

By relabeling what was originally meant to illustrate ‘equality of outcome’ as ‘equity’, the meme has linked DEI initiatives to a crude egalitarianism that virtually no serious thinker endorses. Philosophers began moving beyond the simple opportunity/outcome dichotomy by the 1970s; thinkers like Rawls, Dworkin, and G.A. Cohen spent decades developing more-sophisticated frameworks that avoid the obvious objections to outcome-focused equality.

To quote Heath:

…our most basic reason for caring about equality is our desire to neutralize the effects of bad luck. According to this view, when we look at the kids on boxes meme and agree to take the box away from the tall guy and give it to the short kid, the reason we make this judgment is because height is an unchosen characteristic – it’s not the short kid’s fault that he’s short. The idea is not that everyone should get exactly the same outcome, but that we should not be allowing unchosen differences between persons to determine outcomes.

…from this perspective, the problem with the meme is that it dredges up an old, discredited view of equality, that can easily be undermined just by pointing to cases where individuals wind up with less because of choices they have made. A lot of the excitement generated by luck egalitarianism was based on the perception that we had overcome a significant error in thinking about equality, and could now move on to discussion of more defensible conceptions. And yet all it took was a single meme to turn back the clock by 50 years!

The smoking gun here is that, as per Heath, contemporary DEI frameworks rarely engage with the rich philosophical literature on equality and equity at all, and philosophers, for their part, choose not to engage, wary of how attempts at nuance might be misinterpreted. But if you aren’t afraid of nuance, then I encourage you to read the whole thing:

Why philosophers hate that ‘equity’ meme