The article cares about whether total 'value' goes up.

Whether total value goes up or down (or stays the same), is an important question.

And, obviously, the winners and losers are not going to be identical. Especially for anything that involves fatalities or injuries.

(If you want them to be as close to identical as possible, there's an interesting discussion to be had about mechanisms to achieve that goal!)

The fact that the article is not interested, does not mean that we should not be. The article argues for large scale destruction looking only at certain consequences of it and not accounting for all of them. Such approach might be contrary to the initial goals of the project.

The terms the two of you are looking for in your discussion here are Pareto efficiency, and Kaldor-Hicks efficiency.

Your point is that not everyone is better off, so destruction is not a pareto improvement. Their point is that on net, value is increased, so in theory the ones who are worse off could be made whole through a wealth transfer, and there'd still be a surplus, a Kaldor-Hicks improvement.

You raise an important distinction, but one thing I've always found to be troublesome with K-H is that I've never seen a discussion of whether the winners would have undertaken their profitable behavior but-for the high level of profit. Perhaps if the gentrifiers (as just one example) faced a gentrification tax to fund the lives of people displaced they would not have considered the deal good enough to gentrify in the first place.

I'm not saying this is necessarily true, but it seems like a major problem with K-H as a concept that I personally don't see discussed (I imagine it is discussed in academic journals somewhere).

Land value taxes are pretty good at this.

They would encourage gentrification, but also tax it (in a sense).

Interesting. We must have different articles.

I understand the article to be reporting on some interesting economic papers with counterintuitive results. Of course, those always come with huge caveats, that the article also mentioned.

I don't see any outright arguing for destruction.

See especially the section 'Wait a minute, this is completely insane!'

Looking at this exact section:

> If you accept that (and you should), the only question left is whether the benefits actually exceed the costs. Now we're just haggling over the price, as Churchill said.

The author tries to appear neutral, but their preference is obvious for me.