The idea was to give more people a better place to live.
What the opponent said was you're going to concentrate a bunch of poor people in a building that neither we nor they will maintain, it will be far away from any jobs, and it will lead to more crime and more poverty.
I don't think it takes much to say that people are short-sighted and some are only interested in their own personal short-term gain, certainly no metaphor or analogy is needed to state the obvious.
Housing projects and private high rises seem like they would have similar problems...I'm not finding this easily, but confess I have no academic background in management!
you could search for Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago (torn down) or Pruitt-Igoe towers in St. Louis (torn down), for starters. Or the Cabrini–Green Homes in Chicago.
It was the private ones and the implied comparison that I was after -- but now that I'm re-reading the parent post maybe there was no comparison, just a long sentence describing public housing projects as torn-down neighborhoods with high-rises...
The entire book is about systems and how we typically ignore them to our disadvantage.
There is some overlap between this and Weinberg's Quality books.
And, of course, _Systematics_ explains it all clearly.
It kind of makes sense, if a complex system has found some kind of steady state there must be some "restoring forces" at work to hold it there.
I think this is one of those things that is True with a capital T.
If you start with the premise that life is valuable, it is eventually derivable. Life tries to exist, and since existence is path-dependent making a change is likelier to be wrong than right.
How interesting. Can't exactly run a placebo controlled double blind experiment against the full state of the universe, hm?
I've never thought about the universal preconditions that must be true for me to be thinking about them. This is shifting my whole worldview, thanks!
This agrees with the slightly-neutral theory of evolution. A given mutation is more likely to break something a little bit than improve that something a little bit.