Using the wrong baselines

When people say “there is a lot of …” or “there is not enough of …” they are implicitly comparing something with some specific baseline. Being aware of that baseline is important because otherwise it can lead you to make some silly mistakes.

For example, when discussing the housing problem, many people think that “regulations” can’t really be the problem, because they look around and they see construction happening.

“Around my house there are many cranes!”

And the obvious question to ask is:

Compared to what? To the absolute absence of cranes? You do not know the amount of construction that would happen if regulations were not constraining the supply: the fact that house prices are so high today should already tell us that cranes are far from numerous. In most cases, they’re very few. So why compare with zero? Why not compare with the amount of construction that would happen if one place were on its way to becoming a city like Tokyo or Singapore?

Another example:

“The population is too high. This place can’t maintain so many people.”

Compared to what again? To empty space? To the population density of hunter-gatherer Australia? It might be. But many places on Earth have very high population density and remain very livable. Why would you systematically compare to very sparsely populated places?

Do not systematically use nothingness as the baseline.