Lately I've come to the conclusion that peace and quiet really is a luxury to have. Most people I don't think get to experience it. You need to have money to have it so you can live somewhere nice. Other wise your stuck living in apartment buildings, crowded cities, next to noisy neighbors. Go to busy shared spaces (ppl stop playing radios out doors!) or staying in shitty hotels.

> Lately I've come to the conclusion that peace and quiet really is a luxury to have. Most people I don't think get to experience it.

It absolutely is. I got the chance to live in a quiet neighborhood near the ocean for a few months and I think back fondly to the level of calm during evening walks there. It felt downright _nourishing_ to my psyche.

This is contrast to living within line of sight to San Diego Airport with the first airplane taking off at 6:31a. In addition to waking me up it would also trigger a significant amount of stress - not a great way to start the day.

Cities are not designed for anything resembling healthy living currently. I hope this changes soon.

My apartment complex fire alarms go off once a week due to one smoker or food burning in a single building which then causes every building to start alarming. This week, they are doing testing which means that an entire building fire alarm will go off for every individual unit they test. There are 1000 units here and almost 100 are in my building. I have heard the fire alarm go off nearly 100 distinct times and I don’t even register fire alarms as being useful anymore. These people hate me and want me to die in a fire.

That genuinely sounds like hell - hoping you get a calm environment soon.

It's almost criminal that houses are built so close to the airport. I have a few friends who live downtown in that area and it seems like hell.

Indeed. I understand it's a multi-faceted issue given the economic development the airport has provided (and continues to provide), but it seems health and wellness externalities were not priced in fully. Now that the airport is built and housing density only continues to increase - where does this lead?

From the wikipedia article:

> SAN is in a populated area. To appease the concerns of the airport's neighbors regarding noise and possible ensuing lawsuits, a curfew was put in place in 1979. Takeoffs are allowed between 6:30 a.m. and 11:30 p.m. Outside those hours, they are subject to a large fine. Arrivals are permitted 24 hours per day.[47] While several flights have scheduled departure times before 6:30 a.m., these times are pushback times; the first takeoff roll is at 6:30 a.m.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_International_Airpor...

I've taken off later than 11:30 PM, i think realistically 12:30 is the cutoff, especially on very busy days. I remember hearing that the first month of lockdown was blissful because there were so few flights coming through.

There are plenty of poor people with peace and quiet in rural areas.

I’m not so sure about that, nature is often loud AF. Agriculture, too.

Have you experienced it? I live rural and actually close to railway/highway but the comparison to urban noise is not even close.

Lol yes. I'm currently avoiding opening up doors/windows because the cicadas are sufficiently loud that I've had ringing in my ears every night for the past week.

Then I see the downvotes on my earlier comment and wonder just what image people have of rural living. Last year I didn't get a wink of sleep on an overnight camp because bullfrogs went hard out the entire night.

Also I'm not sure how this became a binary comparison of the densest urban environments or the sparsest rural retreats. The suburbs exist and that's actually where most people live.

Single examples don't refute the statement that many poor rural areas are quiet. However, if many poor rural areas are quiet, then the assertion that quiet is a luxury is contradicted.

I agree with that take

Short of living near a fast moving river, nature is rarely as consistently loud as living in a city. Rural living, away [0] from rivers and highways (mainly interstates) is remarkably quiet and often very affordable in most of the country.

[0] This doesn't even have to be very far away, and noise can be substantially reduced with a fairly small group of trees between you and the noise source.

I've lived through all the spectrum of apartments from modest to exclusive and luxurious. One thing does not imply the other, it's a matter of luck + how (un)civilized are the people surrounding you.

You've obviously never lived in a penthouse or a private residence on a 20 acre property. Noise pollution is not an issue in those situations.

Yes, one of the things that blew me away about luxury apartments in NYC is the level of soundproofing - both in the windows as well as the thickness between floors/ceiling (a foot plus, iirc).

Depending on where that 20 acres is, you can get it for less than the price of a coastal-city closet.

You'll have a hard life ahead of you, though.

You're right, haven't experienced anything beyond 10M. I guess at the very top you don't have these issues at all.

What do you mean by it's a luxury? That it's nice? or rare? or should be rare?

I think rare in the sense that few can afford to have it.

Part of the problem is that those who don't appreciate it will see how nice a quiet town in the country is, then move from the big city to that town and destroy the very thing they originally enjoyed.

Or bring a bluetooth boombox into the wilderness and play it so it can be heard for a mile away.

I'm sure that every country have tiny villages with cheap land. Buy enough land, build a house in the center, grow some trees around and you'll have peaceful house.

Of course there are other issues with that lifestyle which is why it's not adopted widely, like no work, issues for children, issues with healthcare, but for some people it could work, IMO.

> no work, issues for children, issues with healthcare

There's the rub, no? You need to have a lot of money saved up to not have to work which makes it a luxury. For most people, they need to live near work, which is mostly in or near dense noisy cities.

I'm basically FI and could do that, but the problem is I'd be leaving everyone I know to live alone in a middle of nowhere. Granted, a pretty and picteresque middle of nowhere, but still, it sounds like a recipe for misery. That's why I endure living in a loud and smoggy city...

Just remember the cure can be worse than the disease. I agree with you - mostly because of people who "roll coal" to poison cyclists for fun - but I'm wary of involving authority and force. Somehow there are societies that don't have as much of a problem with things like this, so maybe we should learn from them.

Aren't the societies that don't have these problems, often societies that readily employ authority & force & social coercion? Singapore, Japan.

You believe we need a more authoritarian society because some people live lives that are louder than you deem appropriate and enough so that you are willing to 'respond with force' and you somehow see them as the people who are "fucking up the whole game"?

I don't think the city council is oppressing anyone by having the police issue citations to people who wake me up at night with their obnoxious mufflers.

The personal satisfaction from having a loud muffler is actually less important than my ability to sleep at night.

I may be misunderstanding, but having a city council isn't an antithesis to self organizing societies.

In my understanding abandoning self organizing societies that could have more or less noise friendly communities in favor of top down politics that more closely resemble a centrally planned society/dictatorship.

Allowing a city to define what it means to live within it is generally accepted as not the same as a centrally planned society. Certainly that is the case within the United States, where there are very many options for what kind of city one wants to live in. We are not talking about city-states like Singapore. So yeah, we can penalize the noisemakers and not lose any sleep that we're degrading into a dictatorship.

The Coase Theorem suggests that, with sufficiently frictionless microtransactions, people who prefer to make noise and people who prefer not to hear noise could all be happier.

Maybe a phone app with a decibel-meter and a distance metric to each other such app within hearing distance, with pre-authorized amounts to transfer for each decibel level created/experienced?

"could all be happier" probably not, since currently the noisemakers are maximally happy making noise without paying anybody.

Lots of them would be happier to get a small amount of money for being just a little bit quieter. People preferring peace and quiet would be happy to pay a small amount of money to get fans of noisemaking to stay below their annoyance threshold.

Rough sketch of a potential process: Harley Q. is riding through the hills with the throttle open when her phone buzzes, indicating she's approaching an area with residents willing to pay above her threshold for <80db experienced noise. She rolls off the throttle and coasts through the upcoming neighborhood, or takes the long way around. Maybe a small extra payment would be put in escrow if she doesn't approach that area while making noise for a few more weeks.

Please note that the apparent bias toward paying the noisemaker is an artifact of existing noise ordinances. Coase can only help us from where we currently are, not from an imaginary utopia.

If we place this in a hypothetical city with a 40db noise restriction, which allows neighborhoods to accept louder noises by consensus, the payments reverse; Ms. Q will try to select the cheapest neighborhood she can enjoy her noise through, and its residents will end up collectively richer in exchange for suffering through the noise.

That's like saying, "I'll stop punching you if you pay me $50, but until then I'm really enjoying punching you." Assholes are assholes and should not be paid to not be assholes, they should just stop it or pay others whenever they cross the line (via fines or other means).

> That's like saying, "I'll stop punching you if you pay me $50, but until then I'm really enjoying punching you."

It's not at all like that, because punching people is currently illegal, and making noise up to a certain threshold is legal. I like peace and quiet more than I like making noise, so I wouldn't mind a lower legal threshold; but the advantage of paying people instead of fighting to change laws is that there's no actual fight.

The advantage of casting things as a moral struggle instead of a difference in preferences is, of course, that you might be able to gather enough allies to defeat the other side and take their stuff.

If I can change the laws first, then the other side will have to pay me. How to decide what's the best "starting point" for a Coase bargain?

The starting point for a Coase bargain is here, now. If you successfully get the laws changed before bargaining, that gives you a different starting point for bargaining.

If you do have the ability to reliably get laws changed at some expense, you should bring that up while bargaining; it will give you a stronger position. You should be able to get a deal that's better than actually spending whatever resource it would take to change the law.

That makes sense to me.

This is an interesting perspective. Can I ask what your background is that exposed you to this way of thinking?

Lots of reading game theory & economics, and saying "that doesn't make any sense," then reading it again until it made sense. The "rationalsphere" is where I read most of it; sites like lesswrong, overcomingbias, putanumonit, and thezvi.

Sounds like a magnet for noisemakers to route their trips through while staying just at or under the annoyance threshold -- a threshold which, with increased sensitivity, may be shifting lower.

You'll note that I already suggested a small additional payment in escrow for noisemakers to stay away for a few weeks or whatever. I also doubt even the most noise-sensitive neighborhoods would be willing to pay enough to make regular, special trips just for noise-profiteering worthwhile. If they were, it would probably approach the strength of preference that they'd be willing to fight to change local noise ordinances and get an enforcement push.

Thanks for the correction, I see it better now.

My willingness to accept your loud muffler bottoms out at $100,000 per 100 mS per decibel over 40 dB. If you're willing to put up $4-5 million every time you drive by my house, I'm willing to let you pay me for the privilege of ruining my sleep for your stupid car.

Are you Jeff Bezos? You must be crazy rich to not accept less that $4m for a minute of inconvenience. I'd endure it for $100 - with just a couple bikes per day, I wouldn't have to work!

This is a naïve free market view.

Unless you have a government under your thumb, you'll never compel a population to install this app and all use it. Even if you did manage to convince people to use it, participants will game it into submission before it ever gained relevancy.

> you'll never compel a population to install this app and all use it.

Everyone who uses the app gets something they individually want. Noisemakers get the opportunity to be paid to be quiet, and quiet-likers get the opportunity to enjoy peace and quiet for a bit of money.

There's no coercion necessary, although it does rely a bit on geographically local network effects to be useful at all.

Well, if we're willing to go the financial incentives route, we could just slap their ass with a $250 ticket when they ride through town with loud pipes. No need to get all complicated with phone apps and tracking such.

And the "Didn't-Think-This-Through-Did-You" Department asks if one really thinks the Loud Pipes Save Lives and Freeduhm! crowd is going to use a location-tracking app? If the answer is yes, boy, has the head of that department got some bad news for you.

> Well, if we're willing to go the financial incentives route, we could just slap their ass with a $250 ticket when they ride through town with loud pipes.

That is already a thing: https://tiremeetsroad.com/2019/01/07/how-much-are-tickets-fo..., It's just a bit underenforced.

I could see the Harley crowd being reluctant to install such an app, but I could also see it going the other way with the right marketing. After all, your phone already tracks your location and reports it to any company willing to pay. And what if, instead of just cash, the app gave discount points for a local leather chaps store?

It's obviously a problem that affected people have no way to solve this. Authoritarian use of force is one way that might be effective; other ways might be available. I'd be curious to hear some alternative options.

Counter-example:

Sounds are pressure waves that transmit through the air.

Given enough pressure, those waves could even kill someone (bomb).

If we say that there should be no legal limit to sound pressure, then making a bomb explode and killing people should have no legal consequences.

This makes no sense, so we should put a threshold of maximum allowed sound pressure. The discussion now is where is that threshold.

Sometimes outcomes are regulated, not the means of getting to that outcome.

In your case, murder is illegal, but the instrument could be completely legal. For example, water is perfectly legal, although one could force someone to ingest too much water and killing them. It would still be illegal, even though water is legal.

We should still regulate sound levels, mind you.

I mean, you don't need to regulate the maximum pressure, you just need to say "don't kill or injure anyone" right?

You can place the regulation directly on what you want, not just upstream.

Counter-exampe: regulations exist relating to bombs, stabbing, and guns, without having any threshhold of maximum allowed pushing force or speed of matter.

amen