But you know what? It's not luxury to sleep on the sidewalk and get peed on by dogs after your house was bulldozed because it doesn't have indoor plumbing. Or because you didn't start building it in the first place. 30-story apartment buildings might be fine, but declaring buildings "uninhabitable" because they lack luxuries — and prohibiting people from living in them — is an injustice that falls heavily on the poor.

The intent of a building code and the actual result of its enforcement may differ by a wide margin. The injustice largely comes from selective enforcement under inappropriate circumstances.

I didn't intend to make a point about building codes, but rather about how quickly humanity changes its standards for technological advancement. For tens of thousands of years, a mud hut with tile roof and underfloor heating would have been a luxury accommodation. Now, for a lot of people, it's rustic and primitive, fit only for camping trips rather than permanent habitation.

Humanity is scary not only for its ability to construct shelters like this without any specialty-evolved biology, like a woodpecker's beak, a beaver's teeth, or mole claws, but because it can extrapolate the idea of shelter so far beyond our current survival needs that even a thing that well exceeds the minimum requirements is still considered obsolete.

Yes, and of course the result of building codes can often be justice — the people who died in the Haïti earthquake died of a lack of building codes, after all.

I agree that we take learn to things for granted quickly. I think that's unfortunate and leads to a lot of unhappiness. Forcing our addiction to needless luxuries on others is a significant way that it leads to unhappiness, but far from the only one. You also see people dying of lack of physical activity, for example.

I don't think it makes sense to talk about "the intent of a building code". Since we have not yet produced artificial general intelligence, building codes are not yet sentient entities with intent. Different people who supported the enaction of the building code had a wide variety of intents; the different people who convert it from a piece of paper into a pattern of human behavior, by enforcing it, also have a wide variety of intents. Most of these are unknowable.

The intent of the building code is the intent of the people who wrote it. The obvious intent of requiring seismically isolated foundations on new construction is to prevent deaths and injuries due to earthquake damage. The purpose of mounting newly-installed electrical outlets ground-hole up instead of ground-hole down is to prevent failure from a thin conductor falling onto the plug and bridging the hot pin to neutral. The purpose of requiring flush toilets was for better sanitation and less odor nuisance at a time when modern composting or incinerating toilets had not yet been introduced. The purpose of requiring low-flow toilets was... to make a concession to environmentalists while severely annoying everyone else with spinning unflushable turds?

For the most part, it is very easy to determine the original intent of a building code, especially relative to some other varieties of laws.

The enforcers of the building code sometimes betray that intent. This is unfortunate, but there is little that a legislator can do to control a cop or county inspector that may be separated from the consideration of the bill by time, distance, wisdom, and attitude.

Building codes do little good if they are not updated frequently, and appropriate for economic conditions. Earthquake-safe architecture in all residential buildings is not appropriate for Haiti, but it may be for vital infrastructure, such as water treatment plants, ports, power plants, and hospitals.

Thanks to changes in U.S. economic conditions, it may be necessary to revise building codes to make it easier for people to buy new homes costing $40k or less, rather than go deep into debt for an existing home with median price $230k. It does no good to mandate by law that the worst possible home that can be built is still too expensive for anyone to buy.

It should be obvious that one guy building shelters from scratch in the outback is not going to significantly affect the housing market. But there's always that one guy, that power-tripping bureaucrat out to make an example of someone, who ruins it. The problem is not the building codes. It's that guy, who uses them as a club to enforce conformity, rather than as a standard which may accommodate reasonable variances.

It's because of that guy that building codes should not have the force of law. You just can't put the power to knock someone else's house down in the hands of a jerk or an idiot.

While I agree with most of what you say, and it captures important aspects of reality, I think it's still a dramatic oversimplification of reality, to the point of naïveté, in two ways that are in some sense contradictory opposites.

First, it treats people as individuals unaffected by social forces, whose power is treated as unrelated to how they choose to use it. In reality, the dynamics of power in a social organization is an arbitrarily complicated topic, and deeply constrains how people who have power can use it; and people's opinions mostly arise from the conventional wisdom of their social groups, which is subject not only to the limits of bounded rationality, but also to memetic selection pressure.

Second, the legislative and regulatory process is far from the disinterested consideration of the common good you ascribe to it; it's a conflict-filled social process involving constant negotiation among regulators, legislators, and their constituents. It is a mistake to try to understand it as if it were a sentient entity attempting to achieve certain goals by choosing means that its beliefs predict will promote those goals. To a significant extent, the individual people acting inside of it are such entities; but their goals and beliefs are at odds with one another, and as a result, the overall system does not behave in such a fashion. Sometimes it may happen to do so, which is often because the relevant part of the system is dominated by one or another powerful elite that is sufficiently unified to behave that way — although often the interests it promotes are not the common good, but a narrower set of interests. More often, due to collective action problems, it thrashes around in ways that appear irrational and random if you attempt to understand them using the metaphor of a sentient entity.

Your puzzlement about how we could have ended up with such perverse regulations as those that gave rise to low-flow toilets is a good example, but in fact public choice theory abounds with examples.

I say these are contradictory opposites because the first amounts to treating human beings as isolated contemplators, sort of floating in a void, while the second amounts to treating them as mere cells in a superorganism, devoid of individual beliefs or interests, their individuality entirely subjugated to the goals of the collective — a sort of Hegelian apotheosis through what seems to me to be the ultimate degradation. (Perhaps with the occasional exception of that guy.)

I think that with a somewhat more nuanced theory of human collective action, we can understand what does and doesn't work about existing forms of social organization, and then collaborate to improve them, providing us with alternatives that allow everyone to flourish in ways out of the reach of hunter-gatherers building seismically-unsafe huts, out of reach of proletarians toiling in misery in Foxconn factories, and even out of the reach of Captains of Industry hoping fondly to turn our nation into a new Somalia or Honduras.